Ideologically Yoo’s muse appears to idolize the grandiose, and is indiscriminate in selecting heroes. In the Yoo pantheon are president Reagan, and Senator Hatch. It was a smidgeon humorous to read Yoo’s experiential reactions to justiceThomas and AttorneyGeneralAshcroft.

What I see percolating in Yoo’s demagoguery in the interview is a dispersal defense the House committee who interviews Yoo soon will need to address in specificity, namely, that other attorneys and politicians removed the controls Yoo wrote into his original work, creating the basis for upending the uniform code of military justice, the field manual, international treaties on prisoner rights, and releasing nonselect people to perform torture. Yoo avers his concept was probably only about one official in 2002 whom the intell community wanted to torture, and Yoo states that is why he wrote his permissions. Yoo avoids depicting this in detail in several passages but puts it together in a few phrases, carefully read. And he attempts to employ the rhetorical device of claiming the sum total tortures traceable to his memo was three, discounting the deviance at AbuGhraib. He is fairly liberal in broadcasting such discounts, and lacking the interlocutor’s actual Q’s, it is impossible to discern how facilely Yoo seemed to escape providing direct A’s. A followup interview now would be in order, basing it on research of all the discussion that has occurred since the 81pp memo surfaced recently in the public realm. I doubt Yoo is as dissociated from his goals and the processes by which he produced his torture justifications as he intimates. Though I think after reading his discourse he thinks torture should be part of the American way of military life, and part of the intell armarium as well. There is an interesting echo of his notorious quaintness disparagement, too, in one retrospective he provides revealing that his expertise in foreign history related to law may be irrelevant in contemporary US society. He nears this wistful perspective when complaining about the problems the Supreme Court was causing with implementation of prisoner rights countering his own initiatives to establish an insulated executive outside of the law. He is less than explicit about this, but he provides the passing observation that people think now the courts should solve much more than has been the judiciary’s responsibility in the past, and he seems to think that is the weakest part of his having based his torture permissions on precedent; though, clearly, his individual mire in history has been selective, seeking reinforcements from noble ‘conservatives’ past.

I guess this interview really does reinforce the notion of “the banality of evil…..”

Precisely. The evil is constant, it is the banality that makes it so insidious.

The idea shared repeatedly on the legal blogs — that Yoo’s behavior is protected by notions of “academic freedom”, and that he was just rendering good faith if arguably flawed legal advice and can’t be held accountable for what his clients do with it — I find as flawed as the “reasoning” in Yoo’s infamous memos.

Agreed. The academic freedom defense is a hollow argument. Whatever happened to academic excellence? I thought that what institutions such as Harvard, Yale, and Berkeley sell to prospective students isn’t academic freedom, but academic excellence. They tell parents that the education their children will receive is the best that can be had. Using academic excellence as the critical measure, Yoo fails the test.

Moreover, by leaving Youngstown out of his opinion he shows himself to be either an incompetent lawyer or an academically dishonest one. If a scientist at a leading research institution fudges their data by leaving contradictory data out of their analysis, they are subject to firing. Why are legal scholars not subject to the same academic standards as their scientific colleagues?

the repuglitard party is officially CRITICALLY DEAD

John Mccain gets to spend the next six months reenacting the Parrot Sketch

my popcorn stocks are thru the roof

Where is Baltasar Garzon when you need him?

Yoo’s native intelligence, his acquired discipline and family resources got him there. It’s his politics and ethic-less ambition that ought to melt the wax in his wings and send him plummeting.

The idea shared repeatedly on the legal blogs — that Yoo’s behavior is protected by notions of “academic freedom”, and that he was just rendering good faith if arguably flawed legal advice and can’t be held accountable for what his clients do with it — I find as flawed as the “reasoning” in Yoo’s infamous memos.