Yoo claimed president had constitutional power to order a village to be "massacred"

Via Newsweek:

The chief author of the Bush administration's "torture memo" told Justice Department investigators that the president's war-making authority was so broad that he had the constitutional power to order a village to be "massacred," according to a report by released Friday night by the Office of Professional Responsibility.

The views of former Justice lawyer John Yoo were deemed to be so extreme and out of step with legal precedents that they prompted the Justice Department's internal watchdog office to conclude last year that he committed "intentional professional misconduct" when he advised the CIA it could proceed with waterboarding and other aggressive interrogation techniques against Al Qaeda suspects.

[snip]

Pressed on his views in an interview with OPR investigators, Yoo was asked:

"What about ordering a village of resistants to be massacred? ... Is that a power that the president could legally—"

"Yeah," Yoo replied, according to a partial transcript included in the report. "Although, let me say this: So, certainly, that would fall within the commander-in-chief's power over tactical decisions."

"To order a village of civilians to be [exterminated]?" the OPR investigator asked again.

"Sure," said Yoo.

The Office of Professional Responsibility cleared Yoo of professional-misconduct allegations last month.

Jack Balkin at Balkinization explains why:

That is to say, rules of professional misconduct are aimed at weeding out sociopaths and people driven to theft and egregious incompetence by serious drug and alcohol abuse problems; they do not guarantee that lawyers will do right by their clients, or, in this case, by the Constitution and laws of the United States of America. In effect, by setting the standard of conduct so low, rules of professional conduct effectively work to protect all those lawyers out there whose moral standing is just a hair's breadth above your average mass murderer. This is how the American legal profession simultaneously polices and takes care of its own.

[sigh]
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John Yoo, Torture Enabler, Inquirer Columnist

And, according to mediamatters, a bad one.

In his latest column, Yoo comes out swinging with a baseball metaphor but strikes out with an old GOP talking point:

In 2007, candidate Obama declared that his judges would "recognize what it's like to be a young teenage mom, the empathy to understand what it's like to be poor or African American or gay or disabled or old." When he announced Souter's retirement, the president stated he would nominate "someone who understands that justice isn't about some abstract legal theory or footnote in a case book; it is also about how our laws affect the daily realities of people's lives." Empathy is "an essential ingredient for arriving at just decisions and outcomes."

In his 2005 confirmation hearings, Roberts compared judges to neutral umpires in a baseball game. Sen. Obama did not vote to confirm Roberts or Alito, but now proposes to appoint a Great Empathizer who will call balls and strikes with a strike zone that depends on the sex, race, and social and economic background of the players. Nothing could be more damaging to the fairness of the game, or to the idea of a rule of law that is blind to the identity of the parties before it.

Empathy has a proper place in other areas of life, such as medicine or charitable work. And the law does take account of a party's identity when necessary - in deciding whether someone has suffered racial or gender discrimination, for example. But judges should not apply these rules differently in individual cases because of the skin color, or sex, or religion of the plaintiff or defendant.

We've seen this argument before. It, of course, ignores what President Obama actually said:

I will seek somebody who is dedicated to the rule of law, who honors our constitutional traditions, who respects the integrity of the judicial process and the appropriate limits of the judicial role.

But mediamatters has more:

But Yoo was not nearly as negative about demonstrations of empathy by a judge when he described the reasoning behind the judicial decisions of Justice Clarence Thomas, for whom Yoo clerked. To the contrary, in a review of Thomas' 2007 memoir, My Grandfather's Son (HarperCollins) -- in which Yoo praised Thomas' "unique, powerful intellect" and commitment to "the principle that the Constitution today means what the Framers thought it meant" -- Yoo touted the unique perspective that he said Thomas brings to the bench. Yoo wrote that Thomas "is a black man with a much greater range of personal experience than most of the upper-class liberals who take potshots at him" and argued that Thomas' work on the court has been influenced by his understanding of the less fortunate acquired through personal experience.

John Yoo, torture enabler, bad columnist, and now hypocrite.

Things That Make You Go Ewwww

Philadelphia Inquirer hires John "Torture Architect" Yoo as a columnist

Arlen Specter hires Joe Lieberman's fundraiser

Gay soldier forced to beg Obama not to fire him
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The Unitary Executive

Yesterday in Washington, Representative John Conyers tried to nail down some limits to the Executive's power with one of the administration's architects of it's torture policy, John Yoo.

If there's a better example of stonewalling, I haven't seen it.

Here's a transcript from TPMuckraker for that portion of the youtube clip (it's about 1:30 in):

Conyers: Could the President order a suspect buried alive?

Yoo: Uh, Mr. Chairman, I don't think I've ever given advice that the President could order someone buried alive. . .

Conyers: I didn't ask you if you ever gave him advice. I asked you thought the President could order a suspect buried alive.

Yoo: Well Chairman, my view right now is that I don't think a President . . . no American President would ever have to order that or feel it necessary to order that.

Conyers: I think we understand the games that are being played

Notice Yoo's non-answer answer. First he tries to say he's never given the President advice to bury someone alive (not an answer, not even a good deflection) and then he says that no President would have to order that or feel it necessary to order it.

Not that the President can't order someone to be buried alive.

It should have been a simple yes or no.

That Yoo failed to say "no" should give us all great pause.