You may remember John Yoo from this post I did on 12/29/05. John Yoo’s: Torture on a Half Shell
Listen to the madness of another one of Cheney's henchmen:
Download Convicted terrorism conspirator Jose Padilla sued a key architect of the Bush administration's counterterrorism policies Friday, claiming the official's legal arguments led to Padilla's alleged mistreatment and illegal detention at a Navy brig.
The lawsuit claims that John Yoo, a former senior Justice Department official, wrote several legal memos that led President Bush to designate Padilla as an enemy combatant shortly after the U.S. citizen was arrested in May 2002 at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport on suspicion of involvement in an al-Qaida plot.
The alleged mistreatment included forced hooding, deprivation of light and sleep, extreme heat and cold, stress positions, threats of death, use of drugs and introduction of odors into his cell. Padilla used these same claims in an attempt to be declared mentally incompetent to stand trial in Miami, but a federal judge rejected the attempt...read on
We used the same methods of torture on him that Naomi Klein documents in "The Shock Doctrine."
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.
As Arthur Silber states very clearly in his excellent piece on torture:
...it’s hardly surprising, because of the kind of men who were central to the administration’s original decision to embrace torture as a legitimate weapon in its intentionally impossible-to-define “War on Terror. One of those men was John Yoo.”
Here's what Yoo wrote back on 9/25/01. And he actually has a job at UC Berkeley.
