“Torture Yoo” Delivers A Christmas Lump Of Coal

As long as Philadelphia’s conservative house organ of record continues to give column space to one of Bushco’s most notorious enablers, then I and/or others will have no choice but to respond.

Here is some true balderdash (trying not to use bad words) from yesterday’s column (and I’ll try also to avoid Yoo’s laughable editorializing about Obama “growing up,” “(leaving behind) the apologies,” and “recognizing reality”)…

…instead of fleeing Afghanistan, as many in the antiwar left hoped, Obama is sending an additional 30,000 troops. Instead of accelerating the drawdown of American forces in Iraq, Obama is keeping to the Bush timetable.

Uh, no.

If Obama were truly keeping with “the Bush timetable,” then he would be continuing to short change our military in that country while engaging them in the black hole of Mesopotamia with no end in sight; indeed, one of the many problems is that there never was a “timetable.” And while I don’t agree with Obama’s actions in Afghanistan, I understand that he at least is trying to resolve the war in a manner that he thinks is best; I’ll admit that the drawdown over there should take place a lot earlier than the “glide slope,” as National Security Adviser James Jones put it, of July 2011, but however insufficient, this constitutes an improvement from the wretched mistakes of Obama’s predecessor.

As this story tells us (with more here, by the way)…

The problems began in early 2002, former Bush administration, United Nations and Afghan officials said, when the United States and its allies failed to take advantage of a sweeping desire among Afghans for help from foreign countries.

The Defense Department initially opposed a request by Colin L. Powell, then secretary of state, and Afghanistan's new leaders for a sizable peacekeeping force and deployed only 8,000 American troops, but purely in a combat role, officials said.

During the first 18 months after the invasion, the United States-led coalition deployed no peacekeepers outside Kabul, leaving the security of provinces like Helm and to local Afghans.

''Where the world, including the United States, came up short was on the security side,'' said Richard Haass, the former director of policy planning at the State Department. ''That was the mistake which I believe is coming back to haunt the United States now.''

The lack of security was just one element of a volatile mix. Twenty years of conflict had shattered government and social structures in Afghanistan, the world's fifth poorest country, where the average life expectancy is 43.

American officials said the country was more destitute than they had envisioned, yet the $909 million they provided in assistance in 2002 amounted to one-twentieth of the $20 billion allocated for postwar Iraq. Officials quintupled assistance to $4.8 billion by 2005, but then reduced it by 30 percent this year.

The Taliban leadership, meanwhile, found safe haven in neighboring Pakistan. And Robert Grenier, the C.I.A.'s former top counterterrorism official and Islamabad station chief, said Pakistani officials largely turned a blind eye to Taliban commanders, who later seeped back across the border.

And as noted here, as of March 2008, we had about 142,000 of our military deployed in Iraq, with about 31,000 deployed in Afghanistan. That tells you all you need to know about how Bushco failed to prioritize the conflict that truly mattered.

It should also be noted that, in a column ostensibly having to do with foreign policy, Yoo engages in the typical right-wing fearmongering on domestic issues by saying that Obama “wants to nationalize one-sixth of the economy by taking over health care,” and wants to “limit greenhouse gas emissions, which will result in energy rationing.”

These idiotic remarks could laughably be dismissed as the product of a hopeless partisan, as indeed they should be, though concerning health care in particular, the following should be noted (here)…

Obama has rejected a British/Canadian-like single-payer reform and most policy makers are looking for a “uniquely American solution” that preserves the employer-sponsored system and creates a hybrid public-private partnership. In other words, American reforms would look a bit like the Swiss health system in which the government “leaves the provision of health care and health insurance in private hands” but creates a marketplace within which insurers can compete on price, and not avoid insuring the sickest patients.

And this was written in April, while Ted Kennedy still drew breath and long before the public option and Medicare for All were drug into a Senate cloakroom somewhere and bludgeoned to death by the Repugs and their pals Max Baucus, Kent Conrad, Blanche Lincoln, Ben Nelson, and of course Joe Lieberman, among others.

And Yoo’s line that “Congress has conveniently forgotten how to howl about an imperial presidency,” is laughable (funny, but I don’t recall any member of Congress yelling out “You Lie!” to Dubya, though they would have been correct to do so, bad manners and all). But the following line in his screed stating “the attacks on Bush were always more about partisan politics than the Constitution” is too repugnant to go unanswered; in reply, human rights lawyer Scott Horton tells us the following from here…

(Last March) the Obama Administration released a series of nine previously secret legal opinions crafted by the Office of Legal Counsel to enhance the presidential powers of George W. Bush. Perhaps the most astonishing of these memos was one crafted by University of California at Berkeley law professor John Yoo. He concluded that in wartime, the President was freed from the constraints of the Bill of Rights with respect to anything he chose to label as a counterterrorism operations inside the United States.

…

John Yoo’s Constitution is unlike any other I have ever seen. It seems to consist of one clause: appointing the President as commander-in-chief. The rest of the Constitution was apparently printed in disappearing ink.

After enduring another exercise in propaganda like this from Yoo, it would seem that the Inky never got the memo about the “good will towards men” that is commonly cited as an inspiration for our holiday celebrations. And the former Bushco stooge’s latest ramblings should be treated with the same seriousness we devote to tales of toy-making elves, jolly snowmen in silk hats, flying reindeer and sugar-plum fairies.