Tag: john yoo

#rsrh Duelling QotD, John Yoo edition. #p2 #ows

(Via Instapundit) Mr. Yoo is cruel, yet accurate, in his assessment of the almost-competent GWOT strategy of Barack Obama.

Let’s give partial credit where it is due.  Apparently the Obama administration argues that al-Awlaki was a legitimate target because he is a member of an enemy engaged in hostile conduct against the United States.  At least Obama has figured out that the war on terrorism is in fact a war, and that it is not limited just to Afghanistan.  We should be thankful that Obama officials have quietly put aside the arguments they made during the Bush years that any terrorist outside the Afghani battlefield was a criminal suspect who deserved his day in federal court.  By my lights, I would rather the Obama folks be hypocrites in favor of protecting the national security than principled fools (which they are free to be in the faculty lounges both before and after their time in government).

Continue reading #rsrh Duelling QotD, John Yoo edition. #p2 #ows

President Obama defended by John Yoo.

May the knowledge of this burn the antiwar movement’s soul like battery acid.

In some ways, John Yoo’s argument (“Antiwar Senator, War-Powers President“) is almost… superfluous.  The basic point is straightforward enough: President Obama, just like every other President since 1973, has come to the conclusion that the War Powers Act is in fact an unconstitutional and onerous restriction on the executive branch’s constitutionally mandated oversight of military affairs.  This conclusion follows the usual evolutionary arc: as Yoo helpfully points out, Senator Obama and Candidate Obama had a fairly different view of unilateral action than does the (theoretically) better-educated and (theoretically) more experienced President Obama.  Couple that with the further detail that the usual Democratic suspects will not be trying to repeat with Libya their largely ineffectual push against the liberation of Iraq (Kuchinich and Dean, to give just two examples, have already been effectively whipped back into place), and one is left to conclude that there was a lot of deliberate lying about motivations being made over the last decade by the Democratic party.

Again, this is almost superfluous.  John Yoo is arguing on Barack Obama’s behalf.  His major complaint is that Obama’s doing a worse job than George W Bush did*.

John Yoo. The guy who did the waterboarding memos. Continue reading President Obama defended by John Yoo.

Yoo/Bybee protected by Obama administration.

Because you never know.

Thanks to CPAC, I completely missed covering this (Glenn Reynolds reminded me of the story this morning):

Authors of waterboarding memos won’t be disciplined

Bush administration lawyers who wrote memos that paved the way for waterboarding of terrorism suspects and other harsh interrogation tactics “exercised poor judgment” but will not face discipline for their actions, according to long-awaited Justice Department documents released Friday.

I would have asked Abdul Ghani Baradar whether he thought that this exoneration – which is what this is  – had anything to do with the administration’s decision to re-implement Clinton-era tactics of extraordinary rendition, but he could not be reached for comment.

Moe Lane

PS: What’s that?  You’re from the Left, and you gave money to Democrats because you thought that they would prosecute Yoo and Bybee for doing their jobs?  And now you want that money back?  Why, how profoundly silly of you.  Next, you’ll be telling farmers to give milk back to the cows.

Hey, be personally grateful it’s not ‘give bacon back to the pigs.’

Crossposted to RedState.