lawyers and the lawyers who lie to them

Eliminating the Bush system will mean that we will get no more information from captured alQaeda terrorists. Every prisoner will have the right to a lawyer (which they will surely demand), the right to remain silent, and the right to a speedy trial.

this was written by john yoo in the wall st. journal after obama forbid the use of torture against prisoners. along with bybee, yoo wrote many of the d.o.j. memos justifying its use for the bush administration.

from 2001 to 2003, he was working directly with, and under the hands of, the two most important legal officials in the administration: bush's counsel alberto " i don't recall" gonzales, and cheney's counsel david addington. together, they deliberately created and authorized a regime of torture and other brutal interrogation methods that are, as defined by the geneva and hague conventions and the red cross (to name but a few), very serious war crimes. these were government officials who set out to enable a brutal and systematic torture regime, and did so.

yoo helped lay the groundwork with his extraordinary memo that included this:

"If a government defendant were to harm an enemy combatant during an interrogation in a manner that might arguably violate a criminal prohibition, he would be doing so in order to prevent further attacks on the United States by the al Qaeda terrorist network. In that case, we believe that he could argue that the executive branch's constitutional authority to protect the nation from attack justified his actions."

basically, that the president's war powers entitle him to ignore multiple laws which criminalized the use of torture. this perception of the president's potential unlimited scope was right up cheney's alley and the henchmen got to work.

gonzales and yoo worked for the justice department. the justice department does not make the law, nor is it above the law. its job is to enforce the law. the current cia director is asking for amnesty for any of his officers that were involved in the torture. yo!! they just got the notes from the doj! following orders, yo!

the timing of yoo's memos make it quite clear that the white house was booking paper to defend itself when the shit someday hit the fan. hey! they said it was ok!! that mexican guy and that korean guy!! yoo's paper hit the ground right before the most egregious offenses began at abu ghraib.

lawyers lie all the time. lawyers break the law. lawyers wind up in jail. lawyers have defended despicable cases throughout all of time -- slavery and jim crow anybody? a client finds the guy who will suit his agenda. ya think john gotti's lawyer thought he was innocent? mr. cheney? meet mr. yoo and his special brand of krazee.

when all this was being rammed through, no one, not even george tenet, did any research on the genesis of SERE -- survival, evasion, resistance and escape -- which had been created decades earlier to give american pilots and soldiers a sample of the torture methods used by communists in the korean war. these included days of shackling, walling, forced nudity and waterboarding. ahem. a 1956 study found that, "the communists do not look upon these assaults as ‘torture, but all of them produce great discomfort, and lead to serious disturbances of many bodily processes; there is no reason to differentiate them from any other form of torture.” worse, the study found that under such abusive treatment, a prisoner became “malleable and suggestible, and in some instances he may confabulate.”

they did not know that some veteran trainers from the SERE program itself had warned in internal memorandums that, morality aside, the methods were ineffective. that the communists had gotten many more false confessions inspired by extreme duress than actual facts. nor were most of the officials aware that the former military psychologist who played a central role in persuading cia officials to use the harsh methods had never conducted a real interrogation, only practiced on us army guinea pigs.

yet the policy was adopted at warp speed. we tortured countless numbers of men and women. and children.

mr yoo is now a professor of law at berkeley who writes books and blabs on "meet the press". many of his opinions were so off the wall that even the bush admin eventually repudiated them. he held one of the most despicable and perverted perceptions of the constitution i have ever read.

one of our founding father's more brilliant bits of paperwork was its concept of the checks and balances system instilled with 3 separate branches of government. the free press is loosely considered the 4th branch. congress knuckled under to bush in nearly every one of his tyrannical efforts post 9-11. the doj became a puppet. the media was content in being spoonfed lies and half-truths. failure to lockstep would have turned off even the trickle in their info spigot.

the seal for the dept. of justice says: Qui Pro Domina Justitia Sequitur, which roughly translates to "who prosecutes on behalf of lady justice". i can only think she hides her face in shame these days.