...actually there's no maniac and no uranium here, it turns out. The Inqy woke me up this morning with a for-real terror dream. Syria was making the bomb! No mention of skepticism from David Albright or Mohammed el-Baradei. A senior admin official saying the reactor was just a click away! A grainy ISIS photo from space! Strangely, no mention of yesterday's videotape.
Convincing! So here comes WaPo to rain on the parade: another senior admin official says nobody thought this was legitimate information:
At the same time, a senior U.S. official acknowledged that the U.S. intelligence experts had formally assigned only "low confidence" to the possibility that the site was at the heart of a Syrian nuclear weapons program, because it lacked basic components such as a reprocessing plant.
Since we can't both be right here, and since Israel seems to want a land-for-peace deal with Assad, the September bombing and the current flurry of flaky data are clearly functions of inter-agency squabbling, no? Senior intelligence officials in favor of preemptive strikes against fantasy targets are undercutting their colleagues, indeed undercutting Israeli foreign policy. Clearly, the original story is backwards: what the CIA's presentation to Congress suggests is that in September, we got the satellite pics to Israel and leaned on them to make a surgical strike. What does "they asked for no green light" mean? It means preemption was our idea.
So, predictions are easy to come by at this point. Within the month, let's say, Olmert and Assad will sign an historic peace agreement, and Tzipi Livni will make plain that Israel didn't want to bomb that patch of desert, but Bushites bullied Israel into it.
***
Mad Yoo
In the interest of finally catching up on things I've meant to talk about, I'm just going to print an email I sent to the Inquirer in January. John Yoo had just been sued by Jose Padilla's lawyers for his work at the Office of Legal Counsel. On 15 January 2008, the Inquirer ran his apologia. Reading it was like smoking crack. There's not really anything in this email that isn't obvious to everyone, but it's a start.
Sir:
1) Yoo's arguments for the plenary power of the executive during time of war fail to account for the interminable nature of the so-called war on terror. Permanent presidential rule by fiat represents the end of democracy, and the inception of a police state. Thus the animus against Yoo. If this is a democracy, we can only ask Yoo's defenders, in what sense is the global war on terror finite? And the corollary, in what ways are the president's war powers circumscribed?
2) Yoo's relationship to Padilla has less to do with his arrest than with his detention. Yoo is no Jack Bauer. As the primary author of the now-infamous "Torture Memo" written in 2002 in the Office of Legal Counsel and exposed in May 2004, he argues that interrogation methods tantamount to torture are legal (at best, not illegal), that enemy combatants are not subject to Geneva protections, that only the executive shall determine what does and does not constitute torture, and that the executive is justified in keeping the entire process shrouded in secrecy.
Apologists need to make a case. Does torture work? Does torture work quickly? Are other means of interrogating terror suspects invalid? If so, why? Is torture's efficacy and necessity profound enough to trump Eighth Amendment protections against it? How can Congress or the people legitimize a secret war? How can the executive branch write the rules for its own behavior?
No one defending Yoo will touch these concerns with a ten-foot pole, content instead to cry "lawfare."
3) Since Yoo's resignation, every one of his positions has been picked apart in Congress and the courts. The Supreme Court has ruled that indefinite detention without trial is unconstitutional, even when the detainee is a foreign-born "enemy combatant." The practice of torture has been swatted back everywhere from the Detainee Treatment Act to the Army field manual.
All of which begs the question, what extralegal or quasi-legal acts is Yoo currently defending? If we take the president at his word when he says, "We do not torture," then Yoo's spirited assertion of single-handedly crafting a victory strategy in the GWOT falls flat. If we don't need torture anymore to beat Al-Qaeda, why did we need it in the first place?
4) The operative word may not be lawfare, but avoision in Yoo's case. His work at OLC was the foremost instance of sneaking illegality in under a cloak of legalisms. His defenders need to square his charges against Padilla with the Bush adminstration's ongoing use of the law for political ends.
Alternately, if this isn't a crusade to deny terrorist fellow-travelers the use of a legal arsenal, but is merely typical conservative angst over the pressing need for tort reform, then we're just going to have to agree to disagree. (For my part, I see a right to sue anybody anywhere enshrined in the Fifth, Seventh and Fourteenth Amendments.)
But the question of magnitude makes this no ordinary suit. Yoo's actions affect all U.S. citizens, and everyone the United States suspects of being a terrorist sympathizer; depending on your definition, that could amount to one-fifth of the entire world. We're not talking about a cup of coffee to the pants; if actions such as Yoo's are not repudiated, our fundamental rights are forfeit, and human rights takes another body blow.
5) Finally, I am actually on Yoo's side. Padilla's lawyers have turned a matter of obviously unconstitutional behavior into an open political question. They've given the right something to sink its teeth into. By suing a man who could only be loved by far-right law wonks, and who most of us barely recall, Padilla's lawyers have enabled their position to be caricatured as just one opinion among many -- some red some blue all valid -- when it is a matter of redressing transgressions. Sue the president, the DoJ and the OLC instead. Picking on subordinates is craven. The president is the officer with a constitutional duty to discharge; he was either derelict in his management of the executive branch, or was brazenly flouting the law. Sue him.
In fact, this is the only avenue of defense likely to yield a positive result for Professor Yoo. Should he express interest in retaining my services, please forward my email to him.
Yours,
--
ds
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