Much teeth mashing and hyperbole is coming forth from the left on the declassified memo written by John Yoo today. The memo was written to give some advice to the administration and the Pentagon about the use of interrogation techniques in interrogating al-Qaeda and other enemies. Here is the always hysterical Glenn Greenwald:
The fact that John Yoo is a Professor of Law at Berkeley and is treated as a respectable, serious expert by our media institutions, reflects the complete destruction over the last eight years of whatever moral authority the United States possessed. Comporting with long-held stereotypes of two-bit tyrannies, we’re now a country that literally exempts our highest political officials from the rule of law, and have decided that there should be no consequences when they commit serious felonies.
John Yoo’s Memorandum, as intended, directly led to — caused — a whole series of war crimes at both Guantanamo and in Iraq.
Complete and utter BS. There have not been any war crimes committed in either Gitmo nor Iraq. When a conviction on war crimes actually does come along someone please give the memo to Glenn since it appears he is clueless in this regard. Oh, and what serious felonies please? Because some al-Qaeda members were forced to stand a long time, or had loud music played into their cells, or missed some beddy-bye time, does NOT mean these were “serious felonies.” Glenn calls them that, I call them pretty minor forms of interrogation techniques. The three that were waterboarded were the worst of the worst and their interrogations led to information that contributed to saving lives in this country. Pretty damn good use of the technique if I said so myself, especially since Congress never deemed it as torture.
Here is the WaPo’s hyperbole:
The Justice Department sent a legal memorandum to the Pentagon in 2003 asserting that federal laws prohibiting assault, maiming and other crimes did not apply to military interrogators who questioned al-Qaeda captives because the president’s ultimate authority as commander in chief overrode such statutes.
The 81-page memo, which was declassified and released publicly yesterday, argues that poking, slapping or shoving detainees would not give rise to criminal liability. The document also appears to defend the use of mind-altering drugs that do not produce “an extreme effect” calculated to “cause a profound disruption of the senses or personality.” …
Nine months after it was issued, Justice Department officials told the Defense Department to stop relying on it. But its reasoning provided the legal foundation for the Defense Department’s use of aggressive interrogation practices at a crucial time, as captives poured into military jails from Afghanistan and U.S. forces prepared to invade Iraq.
Sent to the Pentagon’s general counsel on March 14, 2003, by John C. Yoo, then a deputy in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, the memo provides an expansive argument for nearly unfettered presidential power in a time of war. It contends that numerous laws and treaties forbidding torture or cruel treatment should not apply to U.S. interrogations in foreign lands because of the president’s inherent wartime powers.
Another BS report. The use of these interrogation techniques was told to Congress a year before this memo and not one of them….NOT ONE….objected:
In September 2002, four members of Congress met in secret for a first look at a unique CIA program designed to wring vital information from reticent terrorism suspects in U.S. custody. For more than an hour, the bipartisan group, which included current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), was given a virtual tour of the CIA’s overseas detention sites and the harsh techniques interrogators had devised to try to make their prisoners talk.
Among the techniques described, said two officials present, was waterboarding, a practice that years later would be condemned as torture by Democrats and some Republicans on Capitol Hill. But on that day, no objections were raised. Instead, at least two lawmakers in the room asked the CIA to push harder, two U.S. officials said.
Yet long before “waterboarding” entered the public discourse, the CIA gave key legislative overseers about 30 private briefings, some of which included descriptions of that technique and other harsh interrogation methods, according to interviews with multiple U.S. officials with firsthand knowledge.
Additionally, this memo was only advice given to the administration and the Pentagon. He held no office to authorize the techniques and as already been shown, Congress was aware these techniques were being used and they had no problem whatsoever with it, even wanting tougher ones to be used. Here is Ed Morrissey’s take on it:
Also, to be accurate, Yoo didn’t suggest that laws and treaties don’t apply to the President. What he gave was an interpretation as to how they apply, and he made a clear point about the limits of Congress to intrude on the executive branch in its exercise of duties as Commander in Chief. Yoo argued that the laws relating to the US certainly applied to the executive related to its domestic duties — ie, the President could not torture civilians on US soil as part of a criminal investigation because of the laws passed by Congress.
However, Yoo notes that the CinC would still be bound by CAT and the Constitution in interrogating alien combatants held abroad. The reliance on standards held in the Fifth, Eighth, and Fourteenth Amendments show that Yoo did not envision “nearly unfettered presidential power”, but power bounded by treaties and the Constitution. The question then falls to what these standards mean, and whether they exclude such techniques as waterboarding, stress positions, and the like.
The left can rail all they want, the fact of the matter is that offering a cup of coffee and saying pretty please will not get any information from the worst of the worst. No one is advocating the pulling of fingernails but when our countries security is at stake our intelligence agents need the tools to extract that information.
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