re: #94 Baier

When did George Bush approve cutting off someone’s testicles? I must be reading the wrong newspapers.

The lawyers who crafted the “torture memo” at DOJ were Jay Bybee and John Yoo. Bybee is now a judge and Yoo is a law prof at UC Berkley who doesn’t actually teach anything because he is culturally radioactive. Yoo has unequivocally stated that the President, acting as CinC may set aside laws as he sees fit and order acts that would be serious felony crimes. Keep in mind that this man was writing actual legal policy guidelines for our military and intelligence services…

01/08/06 “revcom.us” — — John Yoo publicly argued there is no law that could prevent the President from ordering the torture of a child of a suspect in custody – including by crushing that child’s testicles.

This came out in response to a question in a December 1st debate in Chicago with Notre Dame professor and international human rights scholar Doug Cassel.

What is particularly chilling and revealing about this is that John Yoo was a key architect post-9/11 Bush Administration legal policy. As a deputy assistant to then-Attorney General John Ashcroft, John Yoo authored a number of legal memos arguing for unlimited presidential powers to order torture of captive suspects, and to declare war anytime, any where, and on anyone the President deemed a threat.

It has now come out Yoo also had a hand in providing legal reasoning for the President to conduct unauthorized wiretaps of U.S. citizens. Georgetown Law Professor David Cole wrote, “Few lawyers have had more influence on President Bush’s legal policies in the ‘war on terror’ than John Yoo.”

This part of the exchange during the debate with Doug Cassel, reveals the logic of Yoo’s theories, adopted by the Administration as bedrock principles, in the real world.

Cassel: If the President deems that he’s got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person’s child, there is no law that can stop him?
Yoo: No treaty.
Cassel: Also no law by Congress. That is what you wrote in the August 2002 memo.
Yoo: I think it depends on why the President thinks he needs to do that.

informationclearinghouse.info

John Yoo Says President Bush Can Legally Torture Children

Youtube Video

More fun…
google.com

My favorites:

“Military necessity does not admit of cruelty–that is, the infliction of suffering for the sake of suffering or for revenge, nor of maiming or wounding except in fight, nor of torture to extort confessions.” - Abraham Lincoln’s General Orders, 100 Instructions for the government of the armies of the United States in the field.

“Should any American soldier be so base and infamous as to injure any [prisoner]… I do most earnestly enjoin you to bring him to such severe and exemplary punishment as the enormity of the crime may require. Should it extend to death itself, it will not be disproportional to its guilt at such a time and in such a cause… for by such conduct they bring shame, disgrace and ruin to themselves and their country.” - George Washington, charge to the Northern Expeditionary Force, Sept. 14, 1775