Yoo and Bybee, Poor Judgment Indeed

You might think the George W. Bush administration's hijacked Justice Department is still under appointment, what with the final word coming down from there this past Friday about Bush's former Department attorneys John Yoo and Jay Bybee.

Seems the verdict is that the pair of them, who concocted the "Torture Memo" on behalf of the administration toward the beginning of Bush's wartime reign, really did not misconduct themselves professionally after all, as had been the first findings by the Office of Professional Responsibility; that might have meant disbarment.

Instead, the two lawyering hacks only exercised "poor judgment" in writing up and signing off on the official memoranda granting limitless authority to President Bush, overriding whatever bothersome domestic and international laws that might otherwise occlude a presidential wartime notion.

The memo accorded Bush the okey-doke to order torture (felony), declare war on a whim anytime, anywhere, on anyone for any reason (banned), to conduct unauthorized wiretaps of U.S. citizens (Fourth Amendment violation, I don't care how you spin it). Also under this umbrella of exemptions, permission granted to randomly abduct whomever for whyever, bringing them to secret places to be dealt with secretly.

Not that much of that was very new, of course, but Mr. Yoo's authorship of the official memo, and Mr. Bybee's signing off on it, sanctioning the powers-that-be (albeit in cahoots with and with input from the higher-ups, covering ass) to carry forth such war crimes unaffected, should probably result in some sort of criminal culpability, other than deeming it simply a case of bad judgment.

United States v. Altstötter, the Nuremberg Trials: there were tried those justices who wrote up similar legislative memos for the Third Reich, spurred on by Hitler and his cronies, giving the magisterial thumbs-up conceding Hitler's authority to pooh-pooh international law, too.

They, though, were not so easily let off the hook because of so much bad judgment. Nope, they were convicted of conspiracy to commit war crimes and crimes against humanity: war crimes against civilians of territories occupied by Germany and against soldiers of countries at war with them; and crimes against humanity, against German civilians and nationals of occupied territories.

Different führer, different lackeys, maybe, but tantamount to the state of affairs from back then, in my opinion. The two of them, Yoo and Bybee, alongside their co-conspirators in the White House and the Justice Department, rightly should be held accountable for the same atrocities by the same standards applied at Nuremberg.

It won't happen, of course; so much for judicial precedent. Indubitably it follows that if these guys are let off having their feet held to the fire about what they were responsible for having done, the likelihood of the first-string ever being on the hook for even more grievous criminal misbehavior is nil. Taking that option off the table, now there is some serious poor judgment.