{"id":1992,"date":"2008-04-01T23:43:04","date_gmt":"2008-04-02T04:43:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/2008\/04\/01\/somebody\/"},"modified":"2008-04-02T00:17:51","modified_gmt":"2008-04-02T05:17:51","slug":"somebody","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/2008\/04\/01\/somebody\/","title":{"rendered":"somebody…"},"content":{"rendered":"
emptywheel<\/strong><\/font> has a fine post<\/strong><\/a> up about the recently released John Yoo Torture Memos from the Office of Legal Counsel<\/strong> in the DoJ<\/strong>. What struck her was that John Yoo wrote his memos on the day after he was appointed acting head of OLC<\/strong> to replace Jay Bybee. Yoo’s memos [1<\/strong><\/a>][2<\/strong><\/a>]are dated March 14th, 2003. Here’s the Washington Post version of their release:<\/div>\n
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Memo: Laws Didn’t Apply to Interrogators<\/a>
Justice Dept. Official in 2003 Said President’s Wartime Authority Trumped Many Statutes<\/strong><\/div>\n

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." <\/p>\n

Although the existence of the memo has long been known, its contents have not been previously disclosed. 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. <\/p>\n

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…<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
John Yoo still defends these memos as "boilerplate." That’s like Tennant’s comment to Bush about WMD’s in Iraq – "it’s a slam dunk." There’s nothing about these memos that are "boilerplate." Their logic is torturous and tortured. The logic basically says that the President is King and can do whatever he wants to do, because he is the President. Reading them will bring you face to face with what we’ve had masquerading as leadership for the last seven years, and what will be our shame forever. So John Yoo wrote these monsterous memos on the day after he was appointed<\/strong>, six days<\/u> before we invaded Iraq on March 20, 2003<\/strong>. It’s the six days before<\/strong> part that grabbed me. Somebody was in a really big hurry, and the torture policy was premeditated – part of the plan from the start.<\/div>\n

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<\/p>\n
somebody…<\/strong><\/div>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n

Speaking of somebody<\/strong>:<\/p>\n

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Cheney swore off ‘moderate’ campaign promises a month after 2000 election<\/a><\/strong><\/div>\n

<\/p>\n

In his new book, former Rhode Island Republican senator Lincoln Chafee reveals that even before President Bush was sworn into office after the 2000 elections, Cheney had rejected the “moderate course” laid out in their campaign, "The former Senator describes a December 2000 meeting of Republican moderates with Vice President-elect Cheney. Chafee listened as Cheney swore off the moderate course he and Bush had just finished championing in their campaign. Hearing Cheney say “the campaign was over and that our actions in office would not be dictated by what had to be said in the campaign,” Chafee writes<\/strong>, was “the most demoralizing moment of my seven-year tenure in the Senate.”<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
In another part of the book, Chaffe says of his own defeat, <\/div>\n
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“The system works best when power remains in the hands of the voters,” writes Chafee. “I was a casualty of the system working in 2006, and while defeat is never easy, I give the voters credit: They made the connection between electing even popular Republicans at the cost of leaving the Senate in the hands of a leadership they had learned to mistrust.” <\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

emptywheel has a fine post up about the recently released John Yoo Torture Memos from the Office of Legal Counsel in the DoJ. What struck her was that John Yoo wrote his memos on the day after he was appointed acting head of OLC to replace Jay Bybee. Yoo’s memos [1][2]are dated March 14th, 2003. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1992","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1992","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1992"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1992\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1992"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1992"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1992"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}