F**K Yoo

[bigtree]

8:30 PM CDT, April 22, 2009

John Yoo, CIA memo lawyer, goes on offense

. . . at a spirited debate Tuesday at Chapman University School of Law, where Yoo is a visiting professor this semester, the author of much of the legal rationale for using waterboarding and other techniques defended his legal guidance as correct and necessary to protect the nation.

"Three thousand of our fellow citizens had been killed in a deliberate attack by a foreign enemy," Yoo told a packed auditorium on the Orange County campus. "That forced us in the government to have to consider measures to gain information using presidential constitutional provisions to protect the country from further attack."

In a war with a non-state enemy that doesn't follow international law, getting information from captured combatants is vital, said Yoo, now a tenured law professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He said 50 percent of U.S. intelligence about Al Qaeda was gleaned from interrogations.

"Was it worth it?" he asked, brushing off the reaction. "We haven't had an attack in more than seven years."

read: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-torture-lawyersapr23,0,3839563.story


It's remarkable how Yoo is still bragging on getting '50%' of the intelligence the Bush administration used from the tortures he justified in the legal opinions he authored. In Iraq, whatever information they 'gleaned' from torturing detainees to provide links between Saddam and al-Qaeda was obviously tragically flawed and false.

Looking at the meteoric rise in the ranks of (and violence in the name of) al-Qaeda around the world in the period following Yoo's recommended 'enhanced' torture, it's almost impossible to say what violence the interrogations actually prevented. The majority of evidence shows an increase in animosity and opposition to the US, and the swelling of the ranks of those who would identify their resistance to the American military presence and activity across their sovereign borders during the time Yoo is claiming his techniques were keeping us safe.

Heh, so they got most of their 'intelligence' from the tortures . . . like the tripe from the mentally-addled Khalid Shaikh Mohammed rambling about a 'second wave' of attacks supposedly coming right after 9-11.

I'll tell you what the evidence shows . . . 4300 dead American soldiers and the hundreds of thousands of dead wards of our occupations are verdict enough on Yoo and the rest of the Bush bunch who led our nation (and the world) into a clusterfuck of conflict based on what they 'gleaned' from the opportunistic abuses they authored and authorized.

Fuck Yoo.

[sam kane]

1. thanks. nt.

[Laelth]

2. I concur. F Yoo. n/t

:dem:

-Laelth

[ddeclue]

3. Excellent title... F*ck Yoo Too!

:rofl:

[Zen Democrat]

4. How does Yoo explain the Armed Services Report today?

It makes the case the torture was done in support of going to war in Iraq, and then trying to justify it after the fact by finding WMD. It appears to be psychotic political torture.

[northofdenali]

5. "Presidential constitutional provisions" ??????????????????

There is NOTHING in the Constitution or Bill of Rights that I've ever read that give any President this kind of option in wartime or peace. None.

Yoo should be prosecuted for, at minimum, being a traitor to the United States.

[McCamy Taylor]

6. Great title!

:applause:

It deserves to get to the greatest just so DU can have "Fuck Yoo" on the front page. And it is well written, too.

[RandomThoughts]

7. That arguement about making it safer.

It is so obviously wrong.

Lets say Yoo walks into a city, or a town, or even a park in your own neighborhood.

Yoo see a group of people that might have known someone that did really bad things to you. So Yoo walks up and start beating the guy, and the people around him, over and over, as hundreds of people watch.

After a few hours of Yoo just pummelling the people around 'the enemy', hours of pummelling that was watched by thousands of people.

How safe is Yoo? How safe are the people he claims to represent with the big flag he wears on his back, given by him being in the USA White House.

[vixengrl]

8. post hoc, ergo propter hoc?

That dude is more than a bit dim. Why assume our not getting attacked has anything to do with no attack on American soil--attacks have been spaced out due to opportunity and in general, our security and intelligence apparatus isn't too shabby--or better yet, look at terror activity that has occurred elsewhere that wasn't thwarted by any intell gotten through these methods, or consider that we just don't know if we wouldn't have gotten that intell anyway through legal methods? Or that we might have told a bunch of nonsense by distressed individuals who said anything they could think of, true or not?

Whether it works shouldn't even be as nicely relevant to his frame of reference as the legality of those activities, and he should know that too. The history and precedent is against him. In my humble opinion, common human decency is, too, and pretty much the basis of a free and democratic society.

Yeah. Fuck him.