John Yoo's latest affront to decency

For Lent this year, as in every year, I'm attempting to swear off french fries, and contempt for any and all other members of the human race. I'm doing much better with the french fries so far. John Yoo is not helping, what with his latest braying, narcissistic rant in the Wall Street Journal about how grateful Barack Obama should be to him for preserving his commander in chief powers.

I haven't the time this morning to deconstruct every self-pitying contrivance the Journal has seen fit to publish in this op-ed, but I can't help myself in pointing out two things.

One, Yoo is following the script that last week's release of the OPR report on his and Jay Bybee's misdeeds in the Office of Legal Counsel, and senior attorney David Margolis's refusal to adopt the recommendations of professional sanction, represent a full vindication of everything Yoo did. This is just absolutely wrong. Margolis agreed with every substantive claim the OPR made about Yoo and Bybee's biased, shoddy, inaccurate, and destructive work on behalf of President Bush and Vice President Cheney, to say nothing of the fact that said work was also rejected by his own Justice Department after years of damage. What saved Yoo from a disbarment recommendation was solely the fact that everyone knew he was an ideologue to begin with, and he actually believed in the president's policy objective independent of the law. What Yoo is saying now is simply a lie.

The second point I have to make is in reference to the last few paragraphs of today's op-ed, where Yoo characterizes the repudiation of his brand of unchecked presidential and military ruthlessness as unserious and manifestly dangerous, and far worse, co-opts the American military to do it:

This is no idle worry. In 2005, a Navy Seal team dropped into Afghanistan encountered goat herders who clearly intended to inform the Taliban of their whereabouts. The team leader ordered them released, against his better military judgment, because of his worries about the media and political attacks that would follow.

In less than an hour, more than 80 Taliban fighters attacked and killed all but one member of the Seal team and 16 Americans on a helicopter rescue mission. If a president cannot, or will not, protect the men and women who fight our nation's wars, they will follow the same risk-averse attitudes that invited the 9/11 attacks in the first place.

This absolutely makes my blood boil with, yes, contempt, and it does me no good with God to hide it, even during Lent. This is how the story of the SEAL deaths is actually described, by the sole survivor who lived it, Marcus Luttrel:

The four Seals zigzagged all night and through the morning until they reached a wooded slope. An Afghan man wearing a turban suddenly appeared, then a farmer and a teenage boy. Luttrell gave a PowerBar to the boy while the Seals debated whether the Afghans would live or die.

If the Seals killed the unarmed civilians, they would violate military rules of engagement; if they let them go, they risked alerting the Taliban. According to Luttrell, one Seal voted to kill them, one voted to spare them and one abstained. It was up to Luttrell.

Part of his calculus was practical. "I didn't want to go to jail." Ultimately, the core of his decision was moral. "A frogman has two personalities. The military guy in me wanted to kill them," he recalled. And yet: "They just seemed like -- people. I'm not a murderer."

Luttrell, by his account, voted to let the Afghans go. "Not a day goes by that I don't think about that decision," he said. "Not a second goes by."

At 1:20 p.m., about an hour after the Seals released the Afghans, dozens of Taliban members overwhelmed them. The civilians he had spared, Luttrell believed, had betrayed them. At the end of a two-hour firefight, only he remained alive.

I won't comment on the ultimate wisdom, or lack thereof, of Mr. Luttrel's decision not to murder the Afgahn civilians who ultimately betrayed him and his men, except to say God bless their memories and there but for the grace of Heaven go I. But no matter what, John Yoo's assertion, five years after the fact, that the SEAL team leader ordered those civilians released, not because he wasn't a stone cold killer and detaining them in the middle of a covert operation was impossible, but rather because he shared Yoo's irrational fear of an overactive civil liberties lobby and therefore suppressed his best military judgment, is a supremely detestable and self-serving distortion of the available facts.

I don't want to see John Yoo imprisoned, or disbarred, or flogged in the street. I only want him to shut the f**k up. He can rot away at Berkeley for the rest of his miserable life, for all I care - but make no mistake, he is absolute poison. That's ten dollars in the jar for me; I'm off to Penance.