The GOP Has No Decency and it is Hard for the Democrats to Respond Appropriately

What are the Democrats to do? They commit crimes and stonewall and wait for the Democrats to just give up.

The article "DOJ review finds no misconduct by memo authors" at

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/20/AR2010022000940_pf.html

states "An initial review by the Justice Department's internal affairs unit found that former government lawyers Jay Bybee and John Yoo had committed professional misconduct, a conclusion that could have cost them their law licenses. But, underscoring just how controversial and legally thorny the memos have become, the Justice Department's top career lawyer reviewed the matter and disagreed.

"This decision should not be viewed as an endorsement of the legal work that underlies those memoranda," Assistant Deputy Attorney General David Margolis wrote in a memo released Friday.

Margolis, the top nonpolitical Justice Department lawyer and a veteran of several administrations, called the legal memos "flawed" and said that, at every opportunity, they gave interrogators as much leeway as possible under U.S. torture laws. But he said Yoo and Bybee were not reckless and did not knowingly give incorrect advice, the standard for misconduct."

Yoo, according to both US and international law, is a war criminal no matter what Margolis says of the matter. If any of us was Yoo we'd keep our mouths shut, but the February 23, 2010 article "Yoo Lawyer Attacks Dawn Johnsen's 'Partisan' Assertions" at

http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2010/02/23/yoo-lawyer-attacks-dawn-johnsens-partisan-assertions/tab/print/

describes that "Love them or loathe them, one thing that's undeniable about former Vice President Dick Cheney and former Bush administration lawyer John Yoo: neither has shrunk from the public eye quietly.
The latest on Yoo, who's been making appearances on this blog on a practically weekly basis: The Berkeley law professor still has some arrows left in his quiver for his detractors, including Dawn Johnsen, President Obama's nominee to head the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, the same office that once employed Yoo."

In his filing, Yoo and his lawyer, Gibson Dunn's Miguel Estrada, as the article states "dismissed Yoo's critics as uninformed academics or Democrats with political axes to grind. At the top of Estrada's list: Dawn Johnsen, who worked in the Office of Legal Counsel under President Clinton.

Johnsen has written that Yoo's memos approving waterboarding and other practices violated legal standards and the office's tradition of impartial advice."

The GOP has delayed Dawn Johnsen's appointment. Why? Because as the article "Dawn Johnsen Has GOP Hard Liners Quaking in Their Boots. Is She the Wyatt Earp Who Could Bring Justice to Bush Era Outlaws?" at

http://blog.buzzflash.com/analysis/693

states "The real reason for their vehement opposition is that Johnsen is committed to overturning the Bush administration's policies on torture and warrantless surveillance, which would clip the wings of the imperial presidency. Even more menacingly (from their perspective), she is committed to shining a light on some of the darkest skeletons of the Bush years."

They are trying to denigrate her just as they did with Joseph Wilson and so many others.

Just how far has Yoo and his ilk deviated from ethical conduct? The article "John Yoo: President has so much power he can order civilians "massacred" at

http://seminal.firedoglake.com/diary/30838

describes that "John Yoo provided the legal cover for the Bush/Cheney crime syndicate to "take the gloves off," and operate on "the dark side," as Cheney put it. He is therefore implicated in the torture of thousands and subsequent death of over one-hundred detainees, and possibly more....
During the inquiry, Yoo, main author of the now-famous Bush administration torture memo, told Department of Justice investigators that the President had the constitutional right to order the massacre of entire villages."

Cheney needed cover for his "dark side" practices so he claimed that the most radical interpretation of "unitary executive powers" gave the president practically dictatorial powers in the time of war.

The article notes that we pretend to ourselves that all is fine as it concludes "But actually a great deal has changed. We now know our our leaders possess unlimited power during war time, because John Yoo says so, and since there is no end to our wars in this century, there will be no limits to executive power, by definition. As David Cole said, thanks to John Yoo, the President can now commit everything up to and including genocide. Nothing seems to have changed, but everything has changed. Most of us were brought up to consider ourselves citizens of a democratic country; now we are dangerously close to being mere subjects of a monarchical leader, whose powers know no bounds."

E-mails that would have helped Margolis to form a more complete picture of the crimes were lost. We have the laws that prohibit this type of activity, but of course laws don't apply to Dubya. The article "Leahy Calls For Justice Department Investigation Into Missing John Yoo Emails" at

http://www.citizensforethics.org/node/44252

states "We were told that most of Yoo's records had been deleted and were not recoverable. [Former Deputy AAG] Philbin's email records from July 2002 through August 5, 2002 - the time period in which the Bybee Memo was completed and the Classified Bybee Memo (discussed below) was created - had also been deleted and were reportedly not recoverable.

The watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) "called on Attorney General Eric Holder to investigate the destruction of emails" and reported that "the destruction of these emails represents a blatant violation of the Federal Records Act (FRA) and may break criminal laws."

In a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing today, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) said the deleted records pose "very serious concerns about government transparency and whether the [OPR] had access to all of the information relevant to the inquiries."

This isn't new to Leahy as the article continues with this Leahy quote "I recall when millions of emails mysteriously disappeared during the Bush administration, and I had [said] they don't just disappear. They must be there. And I recall them sending their press secretary Ms. Perino out to say, 'what is he some kind of IT expert? That's foolish, they've been deleted. They've disappeared. We all know they've disappeared. Why would anyone suggest otherwise.' And then we found 22 million emails. [...]

During the firing of the U.S. Attorneys...there were a number of emails by Mr. Karl Rove and others in the White House that were missing. Now, two months ago, we finally find those emails of course after the investigation was over and after the time when the U.S. Attorneys might have been reinstated. I hope we don't have to wait that long this time."

The article "Cheney Exposes Torture Conspiracy" at http://www.consortiumnews.com/2010/021410.html states "Cheney divulged that "Cheney acknowledged that the White House had told the Justice Department lawyers what legal opinions to render. In other words, the opinions amounted to ordered-up lawyering to permit the administration to do whatever it wanted."

Yoo knows that the written word takes precedence over the spoken word so he wrote a book in which he detailed how the senior lawyers from the Attorney General's office, the White House counsel's office, the Departments of State and Defense and the NSC [National Security Council met repeatedly to develop policy on the war on terrorism.

They commit war crimes and Cheney boasts of them and nothing other than Leahy saying that he wants to track down Yoo's e-mails happens. During the investigation into the firing of the U.S. Attorneys Rove's and others' e-mails in the White House were missing and then when it was too late they were found. Leahy anticipates that the same thing will occur with Yoo's e-mails. Where is the outrage?