John Yoo has suddenly been thrust into the harsh sunlight of public scrutiny. Amongst the papers the ACLU had obtained recently through their FOIA request to the Pentagon was, surprise, the Bybee/Yoo 2003 torture memo. You know the one authorizing torture at GITMO. Yoo torture memo(warning:PDF) Well it seems it wasn't the only abomination penned by Yoo, to authorize many other nefarious acts by this Maladministration. Marty Lederman wrote this:

First, as Jane Mayer and others have reported, this memo was written in the midst of a bitter battle within the Pentagon about whether the military should -- and could legally -- deviate from its decades-old practice of adhering to the Geneva Conventions and the Army Field Manual. The DOD General Counsel, Jim Haynes, pretermited the debate by informing the JAGs that OLC's view of the law was determinative -- that no matter how much they disagreed, OLC establishes the law for the Executive branch. OLC's view of the law was . . . the Yoo March 14th memo. And DOD's adoption of it had profound ramifications over the following 9-12 months, once the memo was largely incorporated in the Final "Working Group Report" that became the template for abuse in Iraq and Afghanistan.

He continued with this...

Did John Ashcroft or Jay Bybee sign off on this memo? Did either authorize Yoo to issue it without any review by the AAG or AG? If the answer to both questions is "no," then why did John Yoo think he was empowered to issue it? Why did Jim Haynes accept it as the official view of the Office of Legal Counsel? Didn't anyone check with [correction: Bybee] and/or Ashcroft? If not, why not?

This was, in my view, a serious abuse of authority and/or violation of protocol. And it demonstrates exactly why it is so important to abide by such procedural norms -- so that an unconfirmed, rogue deputy in OLC can't just go around offering the most important and ground-shifting legal advice in the Executive branch without that advice having been thoroughly scrubbed and critiqued by others who are more accountable and more seasoned.

So did Ashcroft sign off on it? As Yoo told Esquire...

Yoo: The interrogation question came up, I think, in March, when Abu Zubaydah was captured. That’s what provoked that question.

Esquire: That’s the one that’s been so strongly criticized. Goldsmith said it was slapdash and wasn’t well reasoned.

Yoo: I think that’s unfair, first because Goldsmith never issued an opinion of his own. He’s certainly free to criticize. It goes back to unless you’ve actually made the hard decision yourself, then you don’t really know how you think it through, what you would do. So he says “slapdash opinion,” but we have no idea what he would have done, because he left. Second thing is, it went through the normal process opinions go through in the Justice Department. It was primarily worked on by career staff people, and then went through a process of editing and review by different offices within the department, no different than any other.

Esquire: Ashcroft saw it?

Yoo: He approved it. And so the idea that’s its slapdash, or it was haphazard -- I don’t think was true.

Okay, so what did Ashcroft have to say about it...

Neither the attorney general at the time, John D. Ashcroft, nor his deputy, Larry D. Thompson, were aware of the 81-page memo when it was written and sent to the Pentagon in March 2003, according to several former senior department officials. The Pentagon was told in December 2003 to disregard the legal advice in the memo after Justice Department lawyers raised objections.

It wasn't just the DoJ that objected, so did DoD! From the same article...

Retired Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff when the memo was written, said that he never saw the document authorizing harsh military interrogations and that its narrow definition of torture is "absolutely ludicrous."

"I frankly don't know anyone in the military who bought into that as a good definition of when you cross the line," Myers said this week. "In the end, you want to do the right thing. I worry most about reciprocity, how other countries will treat us."

Exactly, so WTF happened? Who pushed for this crock of shit? Well, stay tuned for further posts, and, pass the popcorn! The shit is about to hit the fan...