Left goes after lawyer whose opinions they don't like

NY Times:

When John C. Yoo, a former Justice Department lawyer, was selected by President George W. Bush in May 2004 to join a government board charged with releasing historical Nazi and Japanese war crimes records, trouble quickly followed.

The Abu Ghraib torture scandal was exploding, and fellow panelists learned that Mr. Yoo had written secret legal opinions saying presidents have sweeping wartime power to circumvent the Geneva Conventions. They protested that it was absurd to name Mr. Yoo, who they believed might have sanctioned war crimes, to a war crimes commission.

White House officials canceled the appointment, though it had already been announced in a news release, and kept the episode quiet. “We saved them from incredible embarrassment,” said Thomas H. Baer, one of the dissenting panelists.

But for Mr. Yoo, a Berkeley law professor, the swift exit from the war crimes board was only the beginning of his troubles. For more than four years, the Justice Department ethics office has been investigating his work and that of a few of his colleagues. A convicted terrorist has filed a lawsuit blaming Mr. Yoo for abuses he says he endured. Law students have led protests, and the Berkeley City Council even passed a resolution in December calling for Mr. Yoo’s prosecution for war crimes.

The Obama administration last week began releasing more secret memorandums written by Mr. Yoo and others that made such wide-ranging claims about presidential power that Senator Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania, called them “shocking.”

The notoriety that follows Mr. Yoo — and to varying degrees half a dozen other Bush administration lawyers — raises difficult questions: What is a government lawyer’s responsibility if legal advice he gives turns out to be, in the view of many authorities, grievously flawed? Can he be blamed for damaging, and arguably illegal, acts carried out with his imprimatur? Should he suffer any punishment?

“I think the legal profession in the United States has been seriously hurt by their conduct,” said Stephen Gillers, a professor of legal ethics at New York University. He called the disputed legal opinions “sloppy, one-sided and incompetent” and added, “There has to be accountability.”

What, if anything, should happen to these lawyers — damage to their professional reputations, punishment by state bar associations, perhaps even prosecution at home or abroad — is now the subject of a lively debate in the legal world and beyond.

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This is an outrage. the same people who defend the ACLU and the pro bono lawyers for representing the people trying to kill us are going after lawyers who were trying to protect us. This is typical liberal Democrat attacking conservative lawyers for doing their job and while the liberals have been going out of their way to aid the enemy at Gitmo. The ones attacking Yoo should be ashamed. They represent much of what is wrong with liberal Democrats in this country and they are why many feel they should never be trusted with national security issues.

They are part of the lawfare assault that is dedicated to interfereing with the war effort to defeat the enemy. The Yoo decisions are defensible on many basis and the assumption that they are not is a reflection of the bias of those challenging them more than the reality of their content. The arguements over the Geneva Conventions are an interesting case in point. Al Qaeda is not a signatory to the Conventions and is therefore not entitled to its protection. Only by the most convuluted of reasoning does a court come up with a ludicrous decision that ignores the words of the Conventions as well as basic contract law. In effect the court attempts to turn the Conventions into a unilateral contract binding only one side of a conflict.

The same people who want to give this protection to the enemy that is not entitled to it completely ignore the enemies obviosu breaches of the Conventions. This also violates another basic premise of contract law, that an agreement is not enforcible against a party when the other party is in breach of it.

One of the infuriating aspects of the coverage of this war is the inability of the media to hold the enemy accountable for its violations of the rules of war. This aids the enemy in several ways. By ignoring the requirements to wear an identifying uniform for example the enmy puts civilians at risk and then uses them as human sheilds. When civilians are then hurt or killed the media rarely holds the enemy responsble, but often repeats enemy propaganda attacks against our forces. It is as if the media is following the enemy's script.