John 'Torture' Yoo now says he'll be honest
By John Amato Saturday Mar 07, 2009 5:00pmJohn Yoo is a disgrace to this nation for his actions in promoting torture in the Bush Administration. This answer in a Q&A session tells you all you need to know about his man.
I’m just going to quote Orrin Kerr on this:
John Yoo:
“Now that I’m not in the government, part of my role, because I have a certain amount of expertise, is to try to keep the government honest.”
– From an interview with the Orange County Register.
On the other hand, back when he was in government….
That’s funny. But it’s also outrageous. It’s not as if Yoo’s job in government was as a press flask. The Office of Legal Counsel really is there to try to keep the government honest.
David Addington and Dick Cheney were instrumental in using sycophants like John Yoo who willingly absconded their integrity and duties to push through Bush's torture agenda.
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Guys like Yoo are the ones who should really be put on trial.
Arrest them, try them and hang them facing each other so that the last thing they see is the reason they are there.
I would never give Bush a free pass except to Hell.
Sounds good to me.
Why are these traitors still free? It boggles the mind.
Jo and calgarylady, you two are absolutely correct!! This economy deal is getting real bad. We should know and expect it to get worse. We were told by almost everybody it is going to get worse. Obama has been in office for six weeks and the right wing power monkeys (Hannity, Limbaugh, Kudlow, O'Shithead, Beck, Rove, Boehner, McConnell Gingrich, Delay and the list goes on and on) are already saying it is his fault even though the right wing said that everything that Obama is doing should be done. They said it back during the end of the campaign. They said after Obama was elected. Now they are blaming him. Well folks it is going to get much worse. It is! Sooner or later people MIGHT get a little out of control. When that happens they will be blaming Bush and his henchmen like Cheney, and Rove and Yoo and Addington and the Wall Streeters and every body else who got us into this deal. These may hope that there will be a safe place to lock themselves up because people are going to be very very very angry. Yoo and the the other torture enablers are only a pimple on an elephant's ass but of course they should be removed.
Prison. Period.
and roast them with my Torch!
No trial necessary. As he feels the Constitution is meaningless, just hang him now. Posse justice.
All these POS repugs who aped Bush's thought that the "Constitution is just a goddamned piece of paper" should not have access to the
civil rights and privileges it offers.
Put all in Gitmo and let 'em rot while they enjoy the tropical climate!!
If I had to pick only one person to go to jail for all the fucked up things the Bush bastards did to our country and constitution, it would be Yoo and if there was a death penalty they should sell tickets to his execution! Wow that might even restore our budget surplus!LOL!
he does have a 'certain expertise' in being dishonest. I still find it hard to swallow that this guy's on the faculty of a law school. Or that he hasn't been disbarred.
Hey, Fuck Yoo John Yoo.
Is that a flask of shit?
Obama Channeling Cheney - adopts cheneys views on Presidency
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1236387654746...
Obama administration defends Torture Memo Yoo vs lawsuit.
http://bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&s...
he very clearly misunderstood what the role of the OLC should be. It should be an objective source of opinion as to whether a particular practice falls within the bounds of the law, not an instrumentality to try to manipulate the facts and circumstances to make it look acceptable when it isn't. Those memos were written how a junior associate would write an assignment given to him by a partner or a client, knowing he has a unsupportable claim and trying to make an argument for it all the while knowing that the law does not necessarily support it. This is fine when a lawyer is attempting to stretch the case law in order to serve his client's best interest in a court of law, indeed, progress in the legal system frequently occurs like this. On the other hand, it is fundamentally screwed up when the "lawyer's" "client" is the government and they're trying to stretch the law regarding basic human rights. Truly despicable, in fact.
Yoo didn't misunderstand anything. He knew EXACTLY what he was doing.
It is you, among millions of others, who don't understand what and why he did what he did - and for whom.
so we will all be enlightened.
Jo he did it for the obvious reason you already know. He did it because Cheney told him to. Cheney told him to write a memo that said it was legal to use these methods. "Just do it, whatever or however you want to do but get it done. Yoo didn't have the balls to say, "Ummm, sorry sir but it is illegal to use these methods and here is why. Blah, blah, blah. No matter what I may write or say it will still be illegal."
He obeyed an illegal order. Still makes it illegal to torture. What did Cheney threaten him with? Or did he do it just for fun and fame.
I seriously doubt that Cheney had to threaten Yoo with anything. Cheney only needed to say, "We need an opinion that it is ok to use certain techniques to get information from these guys. Just write something up that says it is ok." Or maybe Cheney told Scooter to tell Yoo to do it. They guy did not need to be threatened though. Because he was able to get the job in the justice dept. by definition says he would do anything they told him to do. No threats needed. These people do not say "no".
He responded like a junior associate tasked to write a memo making a legally unsupportable claim.
Too f#^king bad. He's a lawyer and knows better. What he did is illegal.
Are you saying, if you are a junior lawyer the law may confuse you, so do as you please: it's part of the learning process? Did he not then give his "opinion" to a senior lawyer, who is also responsible? Please answer.
To me, once you're licenced, you should know the law-- Period.
No, I'm saying if you are junior lawyer and given a task to make an argument that something is legal when it isn't, you make the argument by stretching the law and trying to make it look legal. It's the "longshot" in legal motion practice, where it's pretty clear that the motion you're writing will lose, but you make the argument anyway in hopes the judge is alseep or will be willing to decide against legal precedent. Clearly, this is NOT what OLC should be doing. It is required to respond to QUESTIONS as to the legality of particular practices and issue objective advice in order to provide officials with guidelines as to what is and isn't lawful. Virtually all lawyers have an inbuilt hardwiring of hierarchy in their heads, so, when given the instruction to write the memo, Yoo responded as he probably had many times before in his legal practice and wrote the law-stretching memo to make his superiors happy.
And therefore should be disbarred and tried in a criminal court for offering legal cover for capital crimes.
right in front of us and Cheney is one of the masterminds behind it.
By 'it', I mean perpetual war and terror.
The more screwed up the economy gets the less and less anybody will care about any fucking war on terror.
the economic collapse will just enable the facists - on both sides - to further consolidate power into the hands of the state.
quite comical to see you off your meds.
NOT ME, but I'm Canadian.
clearly the intent was to immunize various members of the Bush administration from prosecution by providing a twisted and screwy legal opinion saying that torture is lawful. He was following instructions from Bush in this regard. What am I not understanding here?
"He was following instructions from Bush in this regard."
You are probably right why he did it. My point is, there is no way anyone could construe American or International law to think it's OK to torture. Following orders is no excuse. Ignorance of the law is no excuse.
If you think it is, try it on a judge (if you ever find yourself in that situation.) That's what I'm saying. So, he's a scumbag, and as a lawyer ought to know better.
Seems like there's aome laws out there that say it's illegal; to offer legal cover for capital crimes. Especially before the fact.
Are there ANY circumstance under which a US President should and may order an individual to be tortured?
Is there no situation within which a President may disobey written, established, US laws?
Is it ever correct for a President to violate the US Constitution?
FDR, generally regarded as a great President, and a Democrat, Permitted the concentration of US citizens who happened to be of Japanese ancestry.
US forces immediately shot people without trial, on orders from Gen. Eisenhower, who were found to be operating German concentration camps.
For the morons reading along; I am not suggesting that the German and American concentration camps had any similarity beyond the involuntary confinement of innocent national citizens.
Having condemned Japan for its bombing of civilians in China, and the Germans for doing so in London, the US began a general campaign of bombing civilians throughout the war, culminating with the A Bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
There is a long history of American Presidents violating US law and its Constitution during wartime. "The Decider' was just carrying on the tradition.
said it was OK because Bush said God told him to strike Afganistan and Iraq.I guess they were getting directions from their God
Anything else results in the erosion of the rule of law and the Constitutional ideals on which the country was founded.
When Jefferson was writing the prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment into the Constitution, is it possible he thought "Well, as long as he gets a legal opinion from some hack saying it's ok, then it's fine."? Probably not.
Bush's claim to be "liberating" the Iraqis from Saddam Hussein's oppressive regime while at the same time stating that torture is legal when the president decides it's necessary is a monumental exercise in Orwellian doublethink.
President Obama should send Yoo to GITO and give him alittle of the water boarding love.
Torture is illegal. Period. No matter who does it.
well Obama is certainly backtracking on torture.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/...
Obama adopts BushCo policies on detainees and renditions
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/18/us/politics...
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20090221/wl_asia_...
john yoo literally answered "it depends..." when he was asked if castrating a child was a justifiable form of interrogation of a suspected terrorist
Just what you would expect from a Republican.
none of them have any gonads any way - they're all cowards, having avoided military service, but perpetrating unending war causing the deaths of who knows how many innocents and soldiers alike.....
he pointed to his gonads and asked his Mother - " Mom, are these my brains?" His Mother replied: "Not yet son."
besides being an amoral sociopath is cut from the same, millenium-old cloth of the courtier. His role is to kiss the ass of him/her at whose pleasure he serves, while secretly plotting to shove a knife between the king's shoulder blades. From General Haig to John Dean to Rove (one can hope), the panegyrics in the King's court are programmed to go for the jugular when they are out of favor. It's a age-old story.
Will he shove that knife between the king's shoulder blades? Will he go for the jugular now that he is no longer a member of that Cheney/Bush administration?
I don't think so.
Hope I'm wrong.
not in power...so now he's whining like a little you know what..."ohhh...please please please don't disbar me...I'll be good".
with "Yoo" know who.
The most arrogant slime I've ever seen.
The interviewer asked him how he slept at night and he smirked
that he slept like a baby thank you very much.
I don't think "abscond" means what you think it means.
"Abrogate"?
I looked it up -- "abrogate" means to abolish, do away with, or annul. I can *almost* think of the word you're thinking of.
And that should be "flack," not "flask," of course.
Dear John,
The word abscond basically has two meanings. 1) to leave secretly and take with you something, usually money, that does not belong to you. 2) to escape from a place that you are not allowed to leave without permission. In what sense are you using the word in this post?
the maggots crawl through this fat fraudelent fucker's eye sockets after either his heart explodes or after some nutbag shows up at Berkeley and splits his skull with a rifle shot at close range in front of a full class.
why would you assume it would be a "nutbag?"
were the Patriots in 1776 nutbags when they fired upon the British?
We still don't know who fired the first shot to start Lexington-Concord, which is widely accepted as the offical start of the Revolutionary War.
And yes, to many people, the revolutionaries were just nutbags. They'd be terrorists by today's standards.
Wow, a lawyer who makes other lawyers look good. Is that possible? Will the American Bar Association ever stop letting this war criminal practice law, and defend the Constitution by disbarring this sleezebag?
And when will Berkeley's Boalt Law School ever wake up and realize that having John Yoo on their faculty is making Berkeley look worse than Pat Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network Law School (now laughingly called Regent University). Berkeley's Yoo makes CBN Law's 'outstanding' alum Monica Gooding look almost credible.
Because he has run out of lies. there is only so much bullshit to go around, and these republican assholes have been using up the worlds supply like nobodies business!
John Yoo is a war criminal. My hope is that someday he is found guilty, and sentenced for the horrors he made possible. Life in prison with no possibility of parole would be a fitting punishment.
John Yoo is a plain old sociopath. The most obvious symptom is his complete lack of conscience.
I'm surprised his tongue didn't spontaneously combust upon uttering the word "Honest" -- I am still waiting for the American Eagle to Straighten Up and Fly Right. Where are the prosecutions for war crimes?
Isn't it time we cut this "lawyer" off at the bar?
EFF YOO!!!
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