Crouching Tiger, Hidden Law Perfesser Like any animal with a spirit and awareness of its own existence in context of its larger universe; as the walls close in and the fences get higher and the taunting gets louder, we will fight. Be they tigers at the zoo or sharks in court rooms; the greater the fear, the greater the attack. I foretold of this day decades ago in my Honors thesis at U.C. Berkeley. (Go Bears!). If President is just the puppet and the Vice President is really pulling the strings, if Karl Rove is to forever be known as “the President’s Brain”, then Law Perfesser John Yoo (also from U.C. Berkeley) should be known as the Architect of the War. Aided by his trusty sidekick Alberto Gonzalez, Pefesser Yoo went far afield of the role of advocate and adviser to the President. He became a co-conspirator and showed the President and staff how to walk the legal mine field. Yoo became the tour guide through the maze of constitutional and international protections and showed the current White House how to behave. It is Yoo who taught the Bush White House the simple rule that if you call a tail a leg, then by golly, the tail must be a leg. “Plausible deniability” is the legal standard. So long as there is some colorable claim that can be made by the Executive to have taken the action they did, they cannot be held personally accountable. In a trend well endowed in corporate America and the law, the White House used lawyers to find a pathway from point A to point B. Many would call that a conspiracy to commit a crime or obstruct justice. Thanks to Yoo, we have Guantanamo Bay. We have renditions. America is engaged in a “War” when only Congress can so declare. Left and right, civil liberties are being snatched up by the Executive. The question of who is and is not a prisoner of war, interrogations, ‘first strike policy’, and the denial of basic constitutional protections were all resolved and defined for the Bush Administration by Yoo. Yoo’s saged opinions, backed up by then Attorney General John “I-cant-beat-a-dead-guy-in-an-election’ Ashcroft, the President and the uber President (Office of the Vice President) forged ahead with their current strategies in Guantanamo and domestic and foreign spying. At last count, the President had violated more than 750 domestic and international laws. Nobody in official Washington seems to give a damn. Now, Yoo is threatening to go nuclear. Apparently José Padilla, the 37-year-old al Qaeda operative convicted last summer of setting up a terrorist cell in Miami, sued Yoo seeking a declaration his detention by the U.S. government was unconstitutional, $1 in damages, and all of the fees charged by his own attorneys. Yoo writes this lawsuit, “by Padilla and his Yale Law School lawyers is an effort to open another front against U.S. anti-terrorism policies. If he succeeds, it wont be long before opponents of the war on terror use the courtroom to reverse the wartime measures needed to defeat those responsible for killing 3,000 Americans on 9/11.” You can almost envision Yoo all red-faced and stamping his feet, now predicting the end of civilization as we know it as schemes against the integrity of the American judicial system. Sooner or later, the current Administration leadership is going to face a court of law. Perhaps Yoo is already trying to disassemble the system for his own future protection. Just maybe he is feeling the ever-shrinking circle of those still crazed with fear sufficient to sacrifice all that Americans hold dear and precious. At its’ core, Yoo argues that a terrorist is making the same arguments as are American libertarians and strict constructionists. Namely, Padilla says he is a criminal not a soldier. Because Congress did Not declare war against Iraq, that he Padilla was entitled to certain rights. Whether a court or later a jury agrees with this question is not the issue. Yoo is the problem. He does not make the legal argument or even the public policy argument defending himself and his actions. Rather, Yoo goes right after you and me, the legal system, and “the left” (whatever that is) and rolls out 9-11. What Yoo wants is for the legal system to provide him and his crew with a level of immunity greater than that of any other government official. Yoo determined for himself that he should be entitled to absolute immunity. Oh, and so too should be the President and the former Secretary of Defense, and a growing list of ranking officials who managed to not be prosecuted.
Posted on: Tue, 09 Dec 2014 10:33:04 +0000