Usually, when I become obsessed with a topic, I feel better after I’ve learned a lot about it – there’s some feeling of cognitive mastery. This is not the case with the Office of Legal Counsel [OLC] Memos that came out of the Department of Justice [DoJ] during those early years after the September 11th attacks turned our world upside down. Like everyone else, I’ve felt waves of outrage as we’ve slowly learned about them. I’ve even read a few of them along the way. Actually, the main culprit, Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo, was already gone from the DoJ by the time we had a clue what had gone on. He was back in California teaching Constitutional Law at Berkley.
In my last post, I tried to quantify the OLC Memos during that period. Since then, I’ve gone back over the memos more carefully. Here’s a more accurate summary, expressed differently:
There are 43 relevant Memos between September 11, 2001 and our invasion of Iraq. Only 20 have been made public or released under the FOIA [42%]. Of those 20, 9 were repudiated before the Bush Administration left office [45%]. The majority are still classified, all being sought under FOIA by the ACLU. But it’s not the numbers that matter. I made a table summarizing all of these Memos with links for all of them that are public:
I suggest you peruse the list and read a few of them. The logic is outrageous! And it’s not just John Yoo’s Memos, though his are the worst. All of them will make you ashamed. They certify things that are patently absurd operating from a version of our Constitution that is foreign to me. I expect that I won’t be able to avoid writing about some of these opinions. And sooner or later, we’re going to see the rest of them. This is too large a breach in the fabric of our laws to overlook…
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