A 2nd Federal appeals court has decided that a former Bush administration official is immune from prosecution over a series of memorandums he wrote that set the United States down the road to government approved torture after then 911 attacks.
John Yoo is a former deputy-attorney general, and is now a law school professor. In 2001 he wrote a memo advising that the military could use ‘any means necessary’ to hold terror suspects, and advised that treatment of terror suspects was torture only if it caused pain that was equal to organ failure or impairment of bodily functions or even death.
Despite the bumbling, scatterbrained, deer-in-the-headlights front worn by George Bush during his eight years of presidency, the man was actually fairly bright, and held an MBA. He wasn’t stupid, but letting his underlings put out memorandums like this, that people actually used as the basis of official behaviour in the name of the United States Government should be a criminal act of negligence. Some would call it the act of a traitor – causing great harm to our reputation as a nation, smearing mud all over our constitution and declaration of Independence.
However, back to Mr. Yoo. It’s scary enough that he sent a memo to the CIA authorizing the practice of waterboarding. It’s scary enough that he advised the president of the United States that he had the power to authorize the use of torture. It’s scary enough that this South Korean immigrant has managed to become an influential voice among elected government officials. What is really scary is that he is a law professor at Berkeley, where he has the eager ears of thousands of future lawyers, judges and politicians, and is now poisoning their minds with his twisted view of right and wrong.
A character like him, if written into a spy-thriller by any one of a dozen authors I can name would turn out in the end of the book to have been a North Korean plant, placed into our system to deliberately shift our values into territory we used to associate with the likes of Adolf Hitler.
Would this man have written Hitler a memorandum condoning the use of ovens and poison gas showers as an approved method of ‘coercing’ the prisoners to behave?
What is even more despicable about this whole mess is that we have the courts of our land backing him up and protecting him, and those who actually carried out the torture.
Our complacency will be the end of us as a society. I would venture a bet that 100 years from now, the government in charge of North America will bear little resemblance to anything we think of as “American”.