Yoo Torture Memo is "Absurd" - Via ACLU Blog:

Last week's release of the March 2003 Yoo Torture Memo (which Scott Horton has dubbed the "Yoo Two" memo, as a previous Yoo memo was authored in August 2002) continues to reverberate around the blogs and elsewhere. (Though Salon's Glenn Greenwald and Rogue Government's Lee Rogers were dismayed to find that media coverage of Barack Obama's poor bowling score overtook news of the memo's release.)

We think the release of the Yoo torture memo merits all the buzz it's receiving. Esquire magazine published the first interview with John Yoo after the memo's Tuesday night release, in which Yoo attempts to justify the contents of his memo. The article states: "John Yoo denied to Esquire that his memo applied to soldiers in Iraq or Afghanistan or that it authorized the kinds of abuses that were revealed at Abu Ghraib," and he maintains the memo was only intended for the interrogations of al-Qaeda detainees at Guantánamo Bay. Yoo adds: "I think that there was no pressure from any other agency from within the department that the opinion was going too far — or that it wasn’t going far enough. It was very much hands off." (Emphasis ours)

Got that? The Ashcroft and Gonzales Justice Department, now notorious for its rampant politicization after the U.S. attorney firings, was "hands off." Curious.

Jameel Jaffer, who worked with ACLU staff attorney Amrit Singh in litigating for the release of the Yoo torture memo, wrote in the UK Guardian over the weekend:

[The memo's] interpretations of federal statutes range from the implausible to the absurd, and it repeatedly ignores or mischaracterises well-settled supreme court precedent. Ultimately it's a political document, with a clear political agenda: to dismantle every possible restraint on the president's power.

...The Bush administration continues to insist that the abuse was isolated, but the government's own documents show that abuse was widespread and systemic.

Brennan Center attorney Jonathan Hafetz called the memo "a tour de force of legal analysis gone bad" on Slate. We continue to call for the release of the still-classified third memo from October 2001, which we learned about last year, in which Yoo asserts that the Fourth Amendment doesn't apply to military operations in the U.S.—an assertion that could be a precursor to the NSA's warrantless wiretapping program.

Ivan Eland writes in "Yoo-surping Power for the Executive Branch" (the puns on Yoo's name are pretty out of control, as you might imagine):

[T]he Fourth Amendment (requiring warrants for any search) and the Fifth Amendment (the right to due legal process) contain no exceptions for wartime. In fact, in a republic—where the rule of law should be king—crises and wartime are exactly when people’s rights are most likely to be endangered and when safeguards are especially needed. So in times of both war and peace, the military (or related agencies, such as the National Security Agency) and law enforcement need to be required to get warrants for surveillance and to give people due process.

"Give people due process." That's all we ask.

(Read Original Article - Via ACLU Blog.)