Why John Yoo Attracts & Repels

There are dire reports that President Obama really isn't serious about ending the Bush Torture Regime, let alone prosecuting its key players. Even if I found credence in such reports, it's just too damned soon to be passing judgment about a hydra-headed monster that took years to construct and will take more than a few minutes to dismantle, let alone investigate.

In the meantime I'm looking back as well as forward, which leads me to John Yoo, who manages to both attract and repel at the same time.

The attraction, such as it is, is that the author of a series of astoundingly disingenuous opinions justifying the use of torture and giving George Bush unfettered powers not only shows no shame, but has kept a very public face. What repels, of course, is that Yoo believes that there is nothing wrong with using Nazi-esque interrogation techniques that violate international treaties and conventions while turning the constitutional balance of powers on its ear and shaming America at home and abroad.

Not surprisingly, Yoo's bully pulpit has been the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal, and he was at it again the other day in condemning the new president for rushing to judgment on closing Guantánamo Bay. This is because the safety of his fellow Americans is now in jeopardy because closing the flagship accomodation of the Rumsfeld Gulag, let alone banning torture, will "seriously handicap our intelligence agencies from preventing future terrorist attacks."

There is, of course, no evidence that the use of torture has prevented attacks, and scant little that Yoo already is the subject of a Department of Justice probe for ethical lapses, but he sure seems to be making the argument through the good offices of the WSJ that he merely was acting in good faith.

That Yoo has not wavered from this view since 2004, as Scott Horton notes, is proof of this defense in the offing should the Obama administration or anyone else come after him.

I don't think that is likely to happen. Not because Yoo was so willing to try to provide Bush, Cheney, Addington, Rumsfeld and Company with a safety net, but because proving that will be extremely difficult.

Unless.

Unless it can be proven that Yoo was told to write opinions justifying the use of torture by back filling that result by cherry picking his way through U.S. and international law. The obstacle here, of course, is finding a paper trail in an administration obsessed with secrecy and for whom disappearing emails and paper shredders were weapons of mass destruction.