Today, the Washington Post revealed the actual contents of a memo from top Dept. of Justice official John Yoo that authorized torture and, basically, said the President is above the law:
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."
Although the existence of the memo has long been known, its contents had not been previously disclosed.
From the ACLU, to whom we all owe thanks and gratitude for having the letter made public:
A secret memo authored by the Department of Justice (DOJ) asserting that President Bush has unlimited power to order brutal interrogations to extract information from detainees was declassified today as a result of an American Civil Liberties Union Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. The memo, written by John Yoo, then a deputy at the DOJ's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), was sent to the Defense Department in March 2003.
"Senior officials at the Justice Department gave the Pentagon the green light to torture prisoners," said Amrit Singh, an ACLU staff attorney. "It is outrageous that none of these high-level officials have been brought to task yet for their role in authorizing prisoner abuse."
A similar OLC memo asserting the same kind of unchecked executive authority was sent to the CIA in August 2002. In that now-notorious document, torture was defined so narrowly that it encompassed only those methods that result in pain akin to that associated with "death, organ failure or the permanent impairment of a significant body function."
In many respects, the March 2003 memo released today parrots the advice previously given to the CIA. In other ways, however, the 2003 memo goes even further. For example, it argues — without any qualification — that, during wartime, the president's Commander-in-Chief power overrides the due process guarantee of the Fifth Amendment.
As bad as the Bush administration is and has been, it's actually quite stunning to see in writing the disregard for the Constitution. The ACLU has posted a pdf of the memo here.
As you can imagine, there is already an enormous amount of commentary online from some of those really great minds who have followed this issue closely. Glenn Greenwald titles his analysis "John Yoo's War Crimes." Christy Hardin Smith writes:
As I'm reading through the Yoo memorandum, I have to keep pausing to clear my head or get up and walk for a while. It's going to be a long day with a pot of tea, and I've already got a pounding headache from my first skim through. Thus far, I'm reading it as "might makes right." Oy.
Marcy Wheeler invites us to participate in the "The “John Yoo, Let’s Pretend We’re Lawyers” Game" and find a reference to the case that determined Presidential powers during wartime, Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer. That case actually limited the power of the president.
Currently, Mr. Yoo is teaching law at UC Berkeley. How does one teach law when one doesn't think the Constitution matters? Just asking.
