Part I
“Whenever we have taken expedient measures, they have turned around and bitten us in the backside.” ~ David Patraeus
General Patraeus was talking about the consequences of side stepping our values and our laws. The DOJ’s final word on John Yoo et al suggests that they just don’t get it. This report, released last Friday, can be summed up as a whitewash.
We’re supposed to believe that these lawyers who attended Ivy League schools and went on to have successful careers had poor judgment and part of the reason is that their judgment was clouded by their ideology.
Even if we buy that Yoo, Bybee et al were so clouded by their ideology, what part of American values says we torture people? What part of American conservatism says we torture people? Where? I want a book, a document, something that says it.
As a result of their poor judgment clouded by ideology, these brilliant lawyers advised former President Bush that torture is legal. So okay, let’s think about this for a minute. The advice these lawyers gave wasn’t misconduct because they were blinded by their ideology. Rather, it was bad judgment. Does this mean they were incompetent? Actually Margolis suggested that the competence question was up to the lawyers’ respective bar associations to decide.’
In short, the lawyers who advised Bush that it is legal to torture were incompetent (ideologically blinded) when it came to being held accountable for misconduct, but they were not competent enough to be disbarred. Makes you wonder how Yoo got hired to be a professor of law, and Bybee passed the sniff test to be a judge doesn’t it?
