Seriously, though. These “trials” are BS. Besides, who ever heard of secret show-trials?

Just as there are pilots who can land on a rolling, pitching and yawing carrier deck after dark, and those who need two and a half miles of flat prairie to land a behemoth loaded with newcueler bonbons. I wouldn’t hire a corporate/tax lawyer to handle a murder case, or a cowboy hatted showman to negotiate a joint venture in China, but I might reverse the assignments.

That’s one reason I have such disdain for the loyalty-at-all-costs priority of this administration and its GOP CongressCritters. It leads to idiotic mismatches of talent and work to do. But then George thinks he does a good job at everything. That’s why he hates facts and despises oversight; deep down where the bible don’t go, he knows it ain’t so.

Goldsmith’s credentials are at least as good as Yoo’s, his job at Harvard has higher standing than Yoo’s at Berkeley, and most importantly, his work and the confidence placed in it by informed and responsible leaders stands in marked contrast to the dustbin quality of Yoo’s own.

Yoo argues that Goldsmith cannot reasonably criticize the work unless he himself first endeavors to address the same legal question. Yoo offers no explicit defense for the charge the opinion ‘wasn’t well reasoned’. Yoo implies all he usual suspects had a chance to review the work, that is was vetted according to the time-tested process that yields good legal opinion from OLC.

Isn’t the point of a legal opinion to make a compelling argument that rests on legal principles, unimpeachable fact, thorough analysis and compelling logic? That this argument would stand on its own? So how can Yoo claim that his legal opinion cannot be criticized unless the critic first endeavors to write their own legal opinion the topic. It’s bullshit, right?

Yoo: The interrogation question came up, I think, in March, when Abu Zubaydah was captured. That’s what provoked that question.

Esquire: That’s the one that’s been so strongly criticized. Goldsmith said it was slapdash and wasn’t well reasoned.

Yoo: I think that’s unfair, first because Goldsmith never issued an opinion of his own. He’s certainly free to criticize. It goes back to unless you’ve actually made the hard decision yourself, then you don’t really know how you think it through, what you would do. So he says “slapdash opinion,” but we have no idea what he would have done, because he left. Second thing is, it went through the normal process opinions go through in the Justice Department. It was primarily worked on by career staff people, and then went through a process of editing and review by different offices within the department, no different than any other.

Esquire: Ashcroft saw it?

Yoo: He approved it. And so the idea that’s its slapdash, or it was haphazard — I don’t think was true.

Some interesting stuff in the Q & A

http://www.slate.com/id/2188008/pagenum/2

She’s a highly-credentialed lawyer and good writer. She hits all the right cautionary notes and cites Lederman and others for depth. Her essay is also filled with the requisite snarky conflation of analysis and pop culture – Yoo managed to cook him “some law in his constitutional Easy-Bake Oven”. But her critique falls flat.

I think it’s because she builds it around the passive voice. Yoo’s Yoo Two memo “became” torture policy, rather than it was used to justify an existing policy. Yoo’s a “mid-level lawyer”, as if he were some desk officer on duty when a call came in saying, “We’ve got us some prisoners; what can we do with ‘em?”

I don’t think that captures Yoo’s place in the Addington/Cheney network, or political and legal genesis of how this memo came to be, or how Team Cheney used it to justify its torture policy. It’s too soon to call her Maureen Lithwick, but if she favorably quotes Doug Kmiec or MoDo too often, it’ll be time to change the name plate.