Thanks to
the L.A. Times for telling me all I need to know about John Yoo's book about why we've been wrong about the President's powers for over 200 years and why Congress has actually been irrelevant all these years. I do not have to wait for my library to get a copy of the book,
"The Powers of War and Peace", and then wait for my turn on the hold list to come up (I'm already waiting to get season 2 of "Alias" and that's a long enough wait).
Yoo, who is now a profesor of law at Berkeley, was the primary author of the Justice Dept's decision that the Geneva Convention was optional for the United States. Yoo was simply acting to promote one-half of the Bush Administration's policy objectives: use the so-called war on terror to maximize American hegemonic power anywhere in the world, by whatever means possible (the other half of the policy agenda, of course, is "make shitloads of money for Dubya and his homies"). The bottom line in all of these arguments, of course, is that 9/11 is such a great excuse, let's use it. And let's not even try to be subtle.
Yoo's role is to destroy language. The war on terror, for example, is not a war. It's a
war, not a war. See the difference? Since it is a
war, and not a war, Congress has no say in it other than to write the checks: "If [Sen. John] Kerry wanted to stop the war, all he had to do was convince his colleagues to not pay for it." How simple could it be?
Yoo enjoys this simple little game, I guess. Working for Attorney General Gonzales, he wrote that torture was not torture. His new book, in the same vein, declares that, well, declaring is not declaring. Yoo understands the semantic essentials of his job: It's much easier to argue a point when your first step is to eliminate language. "Although the Constitution gives Congress the exclusive power to 'declare' war, that wording doesn't mean the president needs to consult Congress to 'make war' or 'commence war,' Yoo's book says." That's right: to "declare" war is the equivalent of sending out party invitations to "declare" one's birthday. Opponents of Bush's objectives and methods have no means of arguing their points, at least with Yoo, because they have no words left to speak. John Yoo owns all the language, so it's a simple task at that point for him to make every winning point. Game over.
Fortunately, as nutjobs go, Yoo is pretty obvious. He sincerely believes, or at least declares such a belief, that a prisoner who has been deprived of the right of habeas corpus may be forced to stand for forty hours, naked, in a freezing cold cell, in standing water that includes his own piss, and, for the just purpose of extracting truth and winning the war on terror so as to promote democracy and human rights, have electricty zapped through his gonads every twenty minutes or so -- as long as the prisoner's internal organs are left intact.
John Yoo's real purpose, of course, is to become a wingnut celebrity. He wants to sell books, and he wants to trade the cachet of being a former high-ranking member of the Bush Administration and a Berkeley Law School professor into a seven-figure annual income. His book is a work of intellectual idiocy, but the book's actual contents are irrelevant. This is not a visionary work destined to guide the future; this is a Nazi field guide on how to enforce a final solution. i know the book is not serious, and I don't even have to read, for this simple reason: John Yoo would have to be one sick bastard to actually believe the shit he writes.