1 Boring Old Man

I’ve been reading the transcript of John H. Richardson’s interview with John Yoo in Esquire. It’s long, and frankly pretty confusing. I wrote a long post about Yoo that I just erased. What I concluded was that the biggest force in Yoo’s opinions was his being the son of immigrants from Korea who hated Communism and came to the U.S. – people who were glad we went to war there. But I erased my post because my comments felt as garbled as Yoo’s.

I was doing nothing. One of the things I was doing was reviewing the implications of the United States signing a treaty about polar bears. Remember, this was not going to be a foreign affairs administration: It was about tax cuts and faith-based initiatives. I didn’t think I was going to stay very long. I’ll probably go back after a year — there’s not much to keep me occupied…

Immediately people started asking me about my issues. I was at my desk, very early in the morning, a little after nine. You get the news: the first plane hit. You’re not really sure it was a terrorist attack. But when you see the second plane hit you know this is human coordination, not random chance. Washington is evacuated, which probably hasn’t happened since 1814, which is an incredible sight — people leaving their cars in the highway and walking home. But I’m told I have to stay behind because of my work on war powers.

Same things: Is this is a war? Can we use the military in response? How can we use the military? Yes, that was a question [Can planes be scrambled to shoot down any remaining hijacked aircraft]. That was earlier: Can we use force? Can you use force in response? What kind of force? What are the standards that guide the use of force?

In fact, that’s why I junked my post. It was about Yoo’s answers to the questions, but when I finished writing it, I was left wondering more about why he was asked those various questions than how he answered. He gave them what they wanted and he’ll pay for that, but I had the distinct impression that he was a patsy for a bunch of Civilians who needed to have some place to dump responsibility for their actions. For all of their bravado, they sure were afraid to act without having a fall guy. Is this  a war? Can we respond militarily? These don’t sound like questions that needed asking to me.

Later, there’s a conclave of lawyers flying down to Cuba to decide about torturing Abu Zubaydah, al Qaeda’s number three guy who had been captured – David Addington, Alberto Gonzales, and John Haynes, counsels for the President, Vice President, and Defense Department respectively. And John Yoo is writing Torture Memos. And then there are detailed meetings of the Principals in Washington to go over the details. The Torture Bureaurocracy kept getting increasingly dense, and, best I can tell the it was populated by people who didn’t have any idea of what they were doing, or any way ro get advice that might have helped them.

Besides Colin Powell [who was apparently opposed to this non-Geneva Convention business], the only person with any military experience was Rumsfeld who had been a peacetime aviator fifty years ago who had later served in the reserves as a flight instructor. They were running interrogations and a foreign war, making things up as they went along. They didn’t trust their Intelligence Organization, so they set up their own in the Defense Department run by Douglas Feith, a man with neither Military nor Intelligence experience [or much sense].