johan's Journal

The New York Times has published an interview with John Yoo. He's was on a book-promo tour. In case you don't remember, he was instrumental in contriving various arguments for how the U.S. Constitution and other laws and treaties the U.S. is party to (like the Geneva Conventions) did not apply to Bush, Cheney, et al.

Here are a couple of choice excerpts:

NYT: "Do you regret writing the so-called torture memos, which claimed that President Bush was legally entitled to ignore laws prohibiting torture?"

JY: "No, I had to write them. It was my job. As a lawyer, I had a client. The client needed a legal question answered."

In otherwords, "Just following orders." This defence was ruled insufficient at the Nuremberg war trials. If he had had any serious moral objections to excusing torture he could have quit - it wasn't even as if he would have been shot for desertion like the German soldiers who really were often following orders.

NYT: "I see various groups are protesting a decision by a California government lawyer to teach a course with you that starts on Jan. 12, claiming he is legitimizing your unethical behavior."

JY: "At Berkeley, protesting is an everyday activity. I am used to it. I remind myself of West Berlin -- West Berlin surrounded by East Germany during the Cold War."

These guys (Yoo, Gonzalez, Cheney, Bush, etc.) amaze me. They really don't seem to think they did anything wrong, at all. And apparently, they're not going to be prosecuted for violating our Nation's most important laws. Which, i think really means we are no longer a nation of laws.

So what are we to learn from that? I guess we're supposed to feel free to kidnap John Yoo, put him in a secret plane, fly him to Afghanistan or Eastern Europe, lock him in a secret prison, and then beat and torture him for months. Because laws don't matter -- he was even the person who wrote the memos that said so.