I had precisely the same reaction when I saw another article by this putz on the editorial page. John Yoo deserves prison.

-Z

The Inquirer especially cannot be trusted. Their reporters editorialize in the middle of a story as was represented on this board last week in regards to education.
I can form my own opinion based on facts, such as my opinion on Rick Santorum, which is why I canceled my subscription.
We still need newspapers, just not the Inquirer.

This is a very interesting post. Thanks for linking to the DOJ internal investigation, which was news to me. I'll be looking forward to reading the results.

but I have real doubts about what looks like a political court leading to his disbarment.

The decision to torture was a political decision made by elected leaders. We held them responsible the right way, through a political process. (And Congress should have and could have done this a lot sooner.)

Yoo is way out there. And the Inky's editorial pages have lurched right since Tierney took over. But I agree with Marc, Yoo should't lose his license for reaching a good faith conclusion that the new administration disagrees with. His prior writings suggest that he really believed in his legal conclusion.

I am always concerned when disagreements about legal advice given are grounds for disbarment. (Most often lawyers lose their license for stealing client funds or not responding to the applicable bar's requests for information during an investigation.) This case is even more acute because if a Republican had won, then he would not be facing any investigation. And licensure shouldn't be a function of what politicians win or lose.

And oh by the way... As Joel from PW says, the content of Yoo's piece is beyond stupid:

And writing with breathtaking stupidity.

Our new president likes to invoke comparisons to the Great Emancipator, Abraham Lincoln. To Lincoln, the Declaration of Independence’s promise that all men are created equal was a “great truth, applicable to all men at all times.” In the Gettysburg Address, Lincoln justified the carnage of the battle with the prospect of preserving the “new nation,” created by “our fathers,” that was “conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

Our nation fulfilled that promise when it amended the Constitution to make clear that the state cannot deny any American the equal protection of the law because of skin color. Immigrants came to our shores because of the promise that they would have equality of opportunity, free from governments that choose winners and losers because of their parents or their race.

Holy crap. I mean: Holy crap.

You know which Constitutional amendment made clear the state cannot deny any American the equal protection of the law for any reason? That would be the 14th Amendment. Which was passed in 1868. Two years later, the 15th Amendment rather more explicitly guaranteed African Americans the right to vote. In 1870.

Apparently our nation fulfilled its promise that all men are created equal about 80 years or so before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat, 90 years or so before Martin Luther King’s march on Washington, and 95 years or so before LBJ spearheaded passage of the Voting Rights Act. It’s as though — in John Yoo’s world — Jim Crow never existed.

An article quoting Bolton's opinions extensively, without mentioning the failures of foreign policy under the Bush administration? It really is hard to understand how someone can write an article like that.

He's a party hack. He just wanted the "experienced" John McCain to have won plain and simple and hence the emphasis on calling Obama "naive" despite the policies he's taking issue with is really basically an extension of decades of standard approaches to diplomacy. It was Bolton who broke with decades of standard operating procedures in diplomacy to begin to continually berate the half century old UN he was sent to go represent us at. This is pathetic to say but between Ferris, Santorum and Yoo, Santorum is only semi-legit voice of the 3 because he's clearly editorializing from partisan political perspective and is quite transparent about that whereas Ferris dubiously tries to cloak his pieces as "analysis".
-Sean
MrLuigi, my cat, actually only types half as badly as I do.

Reading my blog again, dan?

In any event, I heartily concur. One of the main reasons I don't read the Stinky is because of those smae right-wing hacks, many of who are syndicated and have no connection with Philadelphia. John Yoo is just more of the same: total bullshit, predicated on shakey assumptions, misleading/deliberately dishonest, and above all, BOOOOOORRRRRRRRIIIIIIIIINNNNNNNNNGGGGGGGGG. How boring, you ask? Last Thursday, ABC news sat down with Laura Bush for nearly half an hour to talk about "life outside the bubble", and it was more interesting than anything Rick Santorum or Jonathan Last will ever have to say.

The daily news, while imperfect, at least has some kind of balance and local flavor. I may not agree with bloodthirsty harridan Christine Flowers and her calls to execute everyone, but at least she lives here, and at least she's balanced with writers like Jill Porter, Elmer Smith, and Ronnie Polancezy (all local as well).

So now Tierney's dragging the paper even further into the mud, by publishing an abject loser and unrepentant torture advocate like John Yoo. Someone should be asking Tierney if he'd buy Yoo's questionable arguments if it was HIS kid whose testicles the president wanted to crush.

When defending himself, Yoo might argue that Youngstown is such a seminal case that he can hardly be accused of trying to hide it. As one of the above posts mentions, every law student knows the case. Also, Yoo might mention that he cites Massachusetts v. Laird, which in turn cites Youngstown.

This would be no excuse because he definitely should have cited it. But he might argue that his failure to do so should not be grounds for losing his license.

I think the more important issue to explore involves the drafts of the memos and the attendant emails. If there was an expressed intent to deceive, then I can see some sanctions.

If one of our papers has to die, please God, let it be the Inquirer.

Perhaps the Inquirer was once a major newspaper that could pretend to stand on the same rank as the LA Times or Boston Globe or a few other papers that were just a cut below the Post and Times. But it has not been that for a very long time.

No one seriously interested in the nation and the world can rely on the Inquirer alone--you have to read the Times or the Post. And if you do read them, is there anything to be added by reading the Inky? Only at the Inky would the utterly pedestrian analysis of Dick Polman be considered something of value. And after Polman, what else is there? Tom Fitzgerald is a fine political reporter but he can't cover national politics they way six people do at the Times. And if forced to try, he can't cover all the interesting things actually going on in our city and state that affect national politics.

The Inky has some good reporters in Harrisburg—Amy Worden in particular. But considering how many they are, they get very little space to do their job. When I first came to Philadelphia many years ago I used to joke that I knew that a political science major in college, Pennsylvania had to have a state government. But you could go six months without discovering where it was and what went on there in the Inquirer.

And the coverage of what goes in the city is not much better. Patrick Kerkstra and Marcia Gelbart are good reporters. But, aside from a few longer and valuable pieces Kerkstra has done lately, they have little space to really tell us much about what is going on in the city.

Too much state and city coverage is taken up with scandals and trials. Yes, the pay raise scandal and the Fumo trial were / are important. But the Inquirer's obsessive devotion to them was / is ridiculous. Very little of interest happens / happened every day on these stories and we would have been better served by a little attention to the rest of what is going on in the city and Harrisburg. In covering these stories, the Inky has been behaving like a tabloid without any of the style or punch that at least makes a tabloid fun to read.

The result is that the Inquirer pays almost no attention to the only area where it could possibly add value to the Times, that is, in reporting on the efforts of Pennsylvanians to influence national and state political affairs. (The only exception was the casino issue where Jeff Shields did some good work.) The Daily News does a far better job of covering unofficial as well as official ideas. While the Inquirer does the high-minded work of creating citizen forums to bring people together to discuss issues in supposedly unbiased ways, the DN is actually paying attention to the ongoing efforts of citizens to engage in the kind of politics that makes a difference to our lives.

And the editorial pages….Sandy Shea can be prickly, opinionated and downright unpleasant in person. But her editorial pages is aggressive in defense of working people. The Daily News columnists and op-ed pages focus on Philadelphians writing about our city and state. The Inquirer editorials on national issues are high-minded and boring. On local issues they echo the prevailing sentiments of the business community without fail. And, like the news pages, the op-ed page aims high and falls short. The Inquirer would always prefer to run a dull, uninformative piece from semi-famous out of town name than a punchy, well written piece from someone who brings a local perspective to a national issue.

So if a paper has to go, please let it be the Inquirer There is no good business model that will support the kind of paper the Inquirer once was and wants to be. It's time to leave national reporting and thumbsucking to the Times and the Post and the WSJ. The only business model for a local newspaper that makes sense is the one the Daily News has been following for some time. So Tierney should put Gelbart, Kerkstra, Shields, Fitzgerald, and Worden on the Inky and let them do what they and the Daily News does best: cover the city and the state and, to a a lesser degree, the nation from the perspective of Philadelphia.

OK, now Mr. Yoo is going to be very, very lonely. Not citing a case is going to be least of his troubles. He could be going down!! Just desserts.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/03/us/politics/03legal.html?partner=rss&e...

And while it's not the most important thing here, it is exceptionally disappointing as an Asian American - especially when so many Asians identify as Democratic - that the regular Asian American voices featured in our local media have been extreme right wingers: the appalling John Yoo at the Inky, which has also featured Temple prof. Jan Ting (who's been on the right wing bandwagon re: immigration and a number of other issues), and Michelle Malkin who was at the Daily News for far too long. The lack of balance with other progressive Asian American voices is striking, and without that balance, it's a stereotyping that doesn't reflect the majority politics of this population.

that is really shitty news about the Daily News, and i am very disappointed in Brian Tierney. My bet is the Inky fizzles out fairly quickly too.

Over at the Daily Kos, they have released the John Yoo Secret Terror memos. I would link to each, but they are all in pdf format. Someone needs to write to the Inlky and call some serious bullshit.

The memo on extraordinary rendition, written by Jay S. Bybee, then assistant attorney general in the office of legal counsel, further said that prisoners held outside the United States were not protected by U.S. laws against torture, nor against an international treaty banning torture.

The Bybee memo also said that a 1998 law making it U.S. policy not to hand over prisoners to country where they may be tortured was invalid because it unconstitutionally interferes with presidential powers.

However, the possibility that prisoners might be tortured after a transfer to another government outside the criminal justice system appeared to be on the minds of George W. Bush's White House lawyers. The memo suggested ways to U.S. officials could transfer prisoners to countries where they may indeed be tortured without making them legally liable for their treatment.

"To fully shield our personnel from criminal liability, it is important that the United States not enter in an agreement with a foreign country, explicitly or implicitly, to transfer a detainee to that country for the purpose of having the individual tortured," Bybee wrote.

"So long as the United States doe not intend for a detainee to be tortured post-transfer, however, no criminal liability will attach to a transfer even if the foreign country receiving the detainee does torture him," he wrote.

Brings a whole new meaning to the epithet "Stinky". Only a true shit head would knowingly publish John Yoo's screeds.

He's welcome to have his opinions but clearly he went to one of the lightning rods of the Bush administration's geeral dismissal of diplomacy, one of the most extreme architects of "go it alone - pretty much always" and presented it as if Bolton was the uniformly accepted word of God. Instead Bolton was one of the stalwarts of a view of foreign policy and diplomacy that left the Bush administration one of the most deeply unpopular at home and abroad in modern history. To not even mention the controversy surrounding the guy he was echoing in the framing was bad journalism.

Bolton's piece, which an op-ed that should have been titled "I believe everything John Bolton says - Obama sucks" was presented as a more neutral "in-depth analysis" piece, not the highly partisan attack piece it actually was.

So again, its probably not Ferris but the Inky's editorial vision (coming down in this instance no doubt from Tierney) that should be questioned in how it presented what was really a very partisan op-ed piece coming from a very particular perspective.

-Sean
MrLuigi, my cat, actually only types half as badly as I do.

From the ABA Journal:

"I agree with the left on this one," Orin Kerr of George Washington University tells the newspaper. The approach taken by the memos "was simply not a plausible reading of the case law."