Terra Rants Anew From “Torture Yoo”

Time to plunge into local wingnuttia in The Philadelphia Inquirer today, and I need my hip waders for this one (a refresher background post is linked below).

It seems that Bushco sycophant John Yoo is fighting back against Jose Padilla, going on the offense as follows...

Padilla is no innocent. Last summer a Miami jury convicted him of participating in an al-Qaeda support cell in the United States. Prosecutors now are asking the court to sentence Padilla to life in prison. The conviction did not even address his detention in 2002 at Chicago's O'Hare Airport on allegations that he had returned from Afghanistan to carry out a "dirty" bomb attack on a major U.S. city. According to the Bush administration at the time, Padilla had received the green light from Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the planner of the 9/11 attacks.

The reason why none of this was mentioned was because no case could be made against Padilla on any of these charges (thankfully, just because Bushco alleges it, it doesn't make it so in a court of law, at least not in this case); as noted here, these were the three counts in Padilla's indictment…

Conspiracy to murder U.S. nationals

Conspiracy to provide material support to terrorists

Providing material support to terrorists

And though this stuff is anything but honorable, Dubya called Padilla “a grave threat to national security” based on this (and as I noted in the November ’05 post, Padilla – brace yourself now – completed the dreaded Mujahadeen Data Form!! OMIGOD!!!).

Beyond that, it’s really pointless to take seriously much of anything Yoo has to say in this column; it’s really not fit for publication by a reputable newspaper, which explains precisely how it ended up appearing in the Inquirer.

The only reason for the column, really, is self-defense on Yoo’s part because, as he notes early on in the column, a suit was filed against him on January 4 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California on Padilla’s behalf by attorneys working with the Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic at Yale Law School.

Tee, hee, hee (as noted here)…

The factual basis for the suit is that as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the U.S. Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel, Yoo crafted policies dealing with enemy combatants and "alternative" interrogation tactics. In addition, it alleges that Yoo personally recommended to then-Attorney General John Ashcroft that Padilla be named an enemy combatant in connection with the alleged "dirty bomb" plot. It claims that in his book War by Other Means, Yoo takes credit for Padilla's treatment, arguing it was a victory for justice. The suit also alleges that (as has been widely reported) Yoo was a principal drafter of the now-declassified "torture memos," purporting to provide legal justification for the government's use of torture.

Gee, do you think Yoo could have avoided the suit had he felt the tiniest hint of remorse for his abuse of our legal process, along with exercising a bare minimum of common sense?

As I noted earlier, only Bushco could take an unrepentant thug like Padilla and make him a sympathetic character through its idiotic machinations that are more emblematic of regimes we profess to oppose than anything bearing any resemblance at all to the principles upon which our country was founded.

Update 1/22/08: This is probably fair, given what Padilla has already endured (h/t The Daily Kos).