Countdown: Yoo Torture Memo Is More Evidence Of Impeachable Crimes

Logan Murphy, Crooks and Liars: The now-infamous John Yoo torture memo, which states that torture isn’t really torture unless it kills the suspect, and that President Bush’s wartime authority trumps torture law, is creating quite a firestorm. Constitutional professor Jonathan Turley joined Keith Olbermann on Thursday’s Countdown where he once again repeats his claim that President Bush broke the law and that the Democrats were afraid to pursue charges because they know it would trigger impeachment hearings and that scares them to death.

Turley:”…It’s really amazing, Congress, including the Democrats, have avoided any type of investigation into torture because they do not want to deal with the fact that the president ordered war crimes. But, evidence keeps on coming out. The only thing we don’t have is a group picture with a detainee attached to electrical wires.”

LSB: PLEEEASE stop talking about impeachable offenses by this administration! Ain't gonna happen, my friends. Despite overwhelming evidence, this Congress has neither the balls nor the time between vacations/running for office to pursue our Criminal-in-Chief or his traitorous goons. I would love to see the war crimes division in The Hague bring this bum to trial, but that's just my own personal fantasy!

John Amato, Crooks and Liars: John Yoo should be in handcuffs as I write this post. Froomkin kind of says it all:

The Justice Department memo released yesterday is a key link in the chain of evidence connecting the monstrous abuse of detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison
and elsewhere straight to the White House.

President Bush has described the torture and murder of prisoners by U.S. military personnel as the work of an aberrant few. But this 2003 memo opened the door to precisely the kinds of abuse so horrifically chronicled in the Abu Ghraib photographs.

And the memo’s author — John Yoo, then a deputy in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel — was a longtime ally and notoriously pliant scribe for the radical legal views of Vice President Cheney and his chief enforcer, David S. Addington. 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.