I'm really not the best person (not by a long shot) to write up this diary, as I have zero legal training except being dragged through 4 years of a custody battle. My only qualification is that I don't like John Yoo. I don't like that he is a UC Berkeley law professor educating our country's future lawyers. I don't like his lack of decency and integrity, and I really don't like his lies.
So, as your talking-head let me present Yoo's 8/19/06 Los Angeles Times OpEd column:
John Choon Yoo, the principal legal author in expanding presidential powers and undermining the Geneva Convention, was at the ready with pen in hand when the Bush administration pushed the British to prematurely expose the recent UK terror plot. Not one to pass up an opportunity to fuck with the Constitution, Yoo lavishes a little ink on a lie:
...British law enforcement can more easily initiate investigations and obtain search warrants than their American counterparts.
More inky lies:
But increasing detention time or making warrants easier to come by merely extends an old-fashioned approach to catching terrorists. These tools require individualized suspicion and "probable cause"; police must have evidence of criminal activity in hand. Such methods did not prevent 9/11, and stopping terrorists, who may have no criminal record, requires something more.
And more ink, more lies:
American efforts to develop sophisticated data-mining abilities died early in 2003, when criticism killed the Defense Department's Total Information Awareness program. The idea was to develop mining techniques to compare information in government and commercial databases. Civil libertarians engaged in a scare campaign representing the TIA as an unchecked Big Brother. Congress cut off all funding for the program. It was a political defeat early in the war on terrorism, and the president retreated as fast as he could.
Authoritarianism isn't a concept deeply recessed in Yoo's mind, but right in front. Selling it to the nation requires a bit of a snow job, but Yoo is up for the challenge. Read the whole column for his evil talking points:
http://www.latimes.com/...
To wrap up my presentation, I'll leave you with...oops!, a John Yoo hybrid blend of truthy-lie:
Right now, we're fighting terror with one hand behind our back by refusing to exploit data-mining tools. [only some of us are refusing] London's success should serve notice that we must use our technological sophistication and reject the sky-is-falling claims of the extreme civil libertarians.