ooops, dialup screws me again

the link at TPM works

and it was only $5 million

still, that’s a hell of a discount

No freep no – use it as a weapon for peace, like in the Monty Python sketch: “Troops: Ready – Steady – Read the – JOKE!”

Ms E Wheel: It could be that Yoo was really lamenting the fate he shared with fellow minor league bard Scootzie: ever a pair of Salieri schmoes in comparison with the One True Bard of Bush-Cheney World*: Addington.

[*Currently developing theme parks in Medellin & Kuwait City.]

The interview seems to have occurred summer 2007 last year. The lack of questions makes the answerStream perform double work, as if answers could suggest the apposite interrogatory. The extant memo on torture with Yoo part authorship at the time of the interview was much less damning of Y’s academic integrity than the recently publicly released 81pp Yoo memo, and we continue to lack ancillary documents which the 81pp discourse referenced.

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.