Torture Memo Fallout

It was, as The New York Times and Washington Post report, a green light for military interrogators to use just about any technique the Pentagon deemed useful. Criminal statutes prohibiting torture stopped at the water's edge, because, Yoo wrote, "such criminal statutes, if they were misconstrued to apply to the interrogation of enemy combatants, would conflict with the Constitution's grant of Commander in Chief power solely to the President."

As Thomas J. Romig, who was then the Army's judge advocate general, tells the Post, "it appears to argue there are no rules in a time of war."

[...]

Despite the fact that Congress has been asking for the declassification of this memo, it appears to have only been released now as a result of a Freedom of Information Act request by the American Civil Liberties Union.

  TPM

The ACLU! The traitors!

The memo was rescinded just nine months later by Jack Goldsmith, when he came in to head the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel.

Yoo himself doesn't see what all the hubbub is about.

In fact, he says the later Justice Department officials were weenies, too cowardly to uphold the “tradition” of letting the President have his way in wartime.

John Yoo is in fact a law professor in good standing at that liberal oasis Berkeley.

And when will the war criminals be tried, eh?

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.