John Yoo: Not criminal, just incompetent
David Cole assembles some devastating criticism from Yoo’s former colleagues:
The one thing practically everyone interviewed by the OPR agreed about was that Yoo’s legal work on the torture memos was atrocious. Bush’s Attorney General Michael Mukasey called it “slovenly.” Jack Goldsmith, another Republican who headed the Office of Legal Counsel from 2003 to 2004, said that Yoo’s August 2002 memo justifying torture by the CIA was “riddled with error” and a “one-sided effort to eliminate any hurdles posed by the torture law.”
Daniel Levin, who headed the Office of Legal Counsel after Goldsmith left and, like Yoo, was a former clerk to Justice Clarence Thomas, described his reaction upon reading Yoo’s memo as “This is insane, who wrote this?” And Stephen Bradbury, who became acting head of the OLC after Levin’s departure, also under President Bush, and who wrote several memos authorizing torture himself, said of Yoo’s arguments about presidential power, “Somebody should have exercised some adult leadership” and deleted his arguments altogether. These are the assessments not of human rights advocates or left-wing critics but of Yoo’s Republican colleagues at the Justice Department.
I very much like this quote. I’d apply this to a few other people as well:
“John Yoo’s loyalty to his own ideology and convictions clouded his view of his obligation to his client and led him to author opinions that reflected his own extreme, albeit sincerely held, views of executive power.”Report
Never blame on malice what you can ascribe to mere stupidity.Report
Chalking the memos up to incompetence rather than criminal disingenuousness is the very best thing one can possibly say about this work, and amounts to letting these monsters off the hook on the best terms they could conceivably even request on their own behalf. And perhaps they can prove their own incompetence to the world’s satisfaction. But they should be forced to do so in a court of law. I have read a fair amount of David Cole’s work, and heard him on a number of radio programs, and I can assure you, his view is not that these memos were the result of incompetence, but rather of explicitly contemplated criminal malfeasance. http://www.kcrw.com/news/programs/tp/tp100310is_the_obama_adminis
His views should be made clear in a post discussing the subject that mentions his name.Report
This reminds me vaguely of the defense of Ward Churchill, which basically went “Yes, he’s an incompetent moron, but no one minded that before the “Little Eichmann” remarks, and you shouldn’t fire someone purely for having unpopular opinions.” Of course, Churchill was fired, while Yoo still has his academic job, proving that calling Americans names is considered more serious than torturing foreigners.Report