The Bush administration’s go-to guy on all things Torture and by-passing our Bill of Rights has an OpEd up at the Wall Street Journal. From Jason Leopold at The Public Record:
John Yoo, the former Justice Department attorney and author of several controversial legal opinions including the infamous “torture memo,” continues to live in a state of denial.
In an op-ed published Saturday in the Wall Street Journal, Yoo attempted to defend a handful of legal opinions he drafted in the aftermath of 9/11 that one colleague described as “either incorrect or highly questionable” and another colleague said was “sloppily reasoned.”
Yoo complained that his brief comments about waiving the First Amendment in a highly controversial Oct. 23, 2001 legal opinion released earlier this week were taken out of context by the news media.
“In portraying our answer [regarding Bush's right to ignore the Fourth Amendment], the media has quoted a single out-of-context sentence from our analysis: ‘First Amendment speech and press rights may also be subordinated to the overriding need to wage war successfully.’”
Yoo said his point was simply to highlight a past judicial opinion about the inherent powers of the President at a time of war. However, the First Amendment line in the memo could have become the legal basis for the Bush administration to take action against or interfere with journalists investigating the government’s behavior or citizens protesting Bush’s war policies.
How Yoo justifies his pov on the various amendments in our Bill of Rights and torture amazes me. That he attempts now to paint himself as a victim just chaps my hide. As Jason notes, Yoo used his OpEd as an opportunity to go after President Obama for releasing the confidential memos stating Obama released the memo’s to ‘appease the anti-war base’, which evidently is not the case. They were released in response to a lawsuit filed by Jose Padilla, which btw, the Obama DOJ is representing John Yoo on.
Talk about friggin irony…
