Max Fisher crafts a comprehensive review of Yoo's recent PR campaign:
Conservative Case For Yoo GOP strategist David Frum summarizes the standard conservative defense: he's a humble public servant. "The question he had been asked by the security arm of government was not, 'How can we torture?' but 'What can we do that isn’t torture?' Yoo is a lawyer, not an expert in interrogation. He did not recommend techniques. He tried to do something that the U.S. government had not done before: define the legal limit of the permissible."
He defined it as anything short of death or the loss of major bodily organs. Hundreds died as a result of his insane and unprecedented and legally absurd definition. A war's moral basis was destroyed. A massive recruitment of Jihadists was one of the consequences. Yoo helped put this country's security at profound risk, while undermining its core moral values.
The entire point of the Geneva Conventions and the Reagan-signed UN Convention and domestic law and centuries of precedent was never to get anywhere close to torture. The broadness of the ban was designed to stop anyone in government from doing anything like what Yoo proposed and Cheney implemented.
And still, the Obama administration refuses to release the DOJ's report on the professional legal quality of Yoo's legal "reasoning". We do not yet have an independent judgment of whether Yoo was acting in good or bad faith or was simply too stupid and too craven to read the law correctly. Why is Holder still withholding this?
The Dish 