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Some Torture Memo

Disclosure Of Torture Memo Fails To Grab

Traditional Media’s Attention

“What if they disclosed a torture memo and nobody cared? This week, an 81-page memo, authored by John C. Yoo, who was a deputy in the Office of Legal Counsel at the Department of Justice at the time of its creation, was declassified and made public. The memo, which, among other things, was used as the rationale for authorizing the torture of government detainees, has long been held to be a savage reimagining of the structure of the Executive Branch and its authority, hostile to the traditional checks and balances that circumscribe the President’s authority. And that’s stating the matter diplomatically. A less kind observer might conclude that the memo was a legal abomination which tortures the accepted body of Constitutional law along the way to glibly authorizing a Grand Guignol of authoritarian power that our nation’s founders would find abhorrent. With these high stakes as the prologue, you’d have to imagine that the disclosure of the memo would be of pre-eminent importance to the media.”

For solid pushback, WaPo customers needed to seek out Dan Froomkin, who devoted the bulk of his White House Watch column to the matter, and provided plenty of legal analysis from critics. And Froomkin absolutely got it right:

Yoo’s memo is a historic document. It is the ultimate expression of Cheney’s belief that anything the president or his designates do — no matter how illegal, barbaric or un-American — is justifiable in the name of national self-defense.It is also an example of how enabling zealots to disregard the rule of law and the customary boundaries of human conduct leads to madness.

Outside of Froomkin, the best pushback from WaPo came from a participant in Dana Milbank’s chat:

The (sadly) funny part of the Yoo memo is that it purports to uncover an exception to anti-torture treaties if you are torturing the prisoner in order to extract information about pending attacks. That is actually the exact reason for these agreements. It is like arguing that speed limits do not apply if you are in a hurry.