I'm taking my cue from the Rude Pundit to get a little raw on this new tidbut of unabashed John Yoo-ness delivered by Think Progress:
Look at the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. ... Could Congress tell President Truman that he couldn’t use a nuclear bomb in Japan, even though Truman thought in good faith he was saving millions of Americans and Japanese lives? ... My only point is that the government places those decisions in the President, and if the Congress doesn’t like it they can cut off funds for it or they can impeach him.
So, Yoo holds the view that presidential power is singular and unilateral and includes the ability to do anything under the sun in a time of war.
The problem is, as TP's Ian Millhiser points out, there does not appear to be any scenario under which Yoo could really believe what he is saying...
More importantly, Yoo misrepresents the law. As far back as 1804, a unanimous Supreme Court held in Little v. Barreme that Congress has sweeping authority to limit the President’s actions in wartime.
snip
John Yoo is a moral vacuum, but he is also a constitutional law professor at one of the nation’s top law schools and a former Supreme Court clerk. It is simply impossible that Yoo is not aware of Little, Hamdi and Hamdan, or that he does not understand what they say. So when John Yoo claims that the President is not bound by Congressional limits, he is not simply ignorant or misunderstanding the law. He is lying.
I have diaried before here my personal (but professionally informed) view that John Yoo is a sadist. It was a while ago, and a lot of new evidence has come forward to confirm this view. Let's review the facts with a smattering of spin.
- John Yoo, probably under direct orders from Dick Cheney, authorized torture for use in interrogation. He probably helped to coin the pure bullshit term "Enhanced Interrogation" but goddam if he didn't know it was straight up torture. Waterboarding has been considered torture for decades, as Dahlia Lithwick elegantly described yesterday.
- John Yoo acted unethically and illegally in acknowledging that waterboarding was not torture and was in fact okay in a time of war.
- John Yoo also has indicated that the following things are okay to order up during a time of war: massacring an entire village of civilians and crushing the testicles of a child.
Slight pause. I cannot get past that last bit without pausing for a moment to keep myself from vomiting. As the father of two small children, that fact alone about John Yoo makes me feel sick, depressed, and violent all at the same time. It is simply soul shattering and mind boggling even to read those words and realize that a real person, not a fictional character, spoke them.
- Now, John Yoo says that during a time of war the president can unilaterally decide to wipe out an entire civilization. Even though, as Millhiser reports, the legal precedent clearly stipulates otherwise.
I am not a legal scholar and perhaps somewhere down the road a true legal scholar will say no, John Yoo is technically correct, under certain contingencies the president can order a nuclear attack unilaterally.
But for now, what I have to say is that the preponderance of evidence shows that John Yoo is a decrepit, callous, and now deceitful sadist. Perhaps he was just following orders. But what that logic fails to note is that people self-select into their occupational pursuits. John Yoo knew -- I swear to you, he knew -- when he accepted the job working in the Cheney administration that the day might come that he could provide the legal basis for acts of pure sadism committed in the name of justice.