April 02, 2008
Secret Memos and Yoo Know Who
Lots of juicy news flowing from the Department of Justice. Thanks to the persistant efforts of the ACLU doing the job of Congress for the American people, the Yoo torture memos were released. Yoo who, you ask?
He's just a lowly worm in the process of right wrenching at the Department of Justice which is so beautifully documented by Scott Horton in Harper's. That clickie, by the way, is a designated "must read" by the good citizens here at Dakota. If you care about your country try to concentrate.
The Republican project of the past seven years has been to build on that success, to transform the legal apparatus of the United States into an instrument of partisan force. Each step of that transformation has been well reported, but few commentators have noted how those steps have in turn brought about a complete subversion of the original law-enforcement function of the Justice Department. Indeed, the absence of controversy demonstrates precisely how successful the administration has been at mainstreaming its odd notions of justice. And this raises a larger concern.
Yoo didn't stop with torture he wrote the memo for justified surveillance too. In fact, he was so good at memos that they made him a law professor at Berkeley.
Of course all his memos were classified secret, and very hard to obtain. The Federation of American Scientists questions what all this secrecy is about anyway.
From a secrecy policy point of view, the document [Yoo's] itself exemplifies the political abuse of classification authority. Though it was classified at the Secret level, nothing in the document could possibly pose a threat to national security, particularly since it is presented as an interpretation of law rather than an operational plan. Instead, it seems self-evident that the legal memorandum was classified not to protect national security but to evade unwanted public controversy.What is arguably worse is that for years there was no oversight mechanism, in Congress or elsewhere, that was capable of identifying and correcting this abuse of secrecy authority. (Had the ACLU not challenged the withholding of the document in court, it would undoubtedly remain inaccessible.) Consequently, one must assume similar abuses of classification are prevalent.
Speaking of former DOJ employees returned to civilian life after performing dirty deeds, everybody's darling Monica Goodling was wed to the right wing blogger who founded Redstate. Be sure to read the comments. Somehow The New York Times Wedding Section missed this one.
Photo note: Since torture chambers are currently off limits to photographers, we find we have to make do with construction sites.