Remember John Yoo – one of Bush’s torture apologists when he was deputy assistant attorney general in the US Justice Department? Well, he’s back. And now, he’s saying that only the president should be allowed to declare war because that’s the way the founders wanted it.
Speaking last week at the right-wing American Enterprise Institute where Yoo is a visiting scholar, he wowed them with these pearls of wisdom:
“There are certainly decisions that Congress participated in that might have led to bad wars,” he said. “Whether the Iraq war turns out well or badly, Congress issued a decision to authorize war. Vietnam is another war for which Congress passed a statute authorizing hostility. It doesn’t seem to me that congressional participation automatically leads to good wars.”
[…]
“How would the pro-Congress model actually work in today’s world with the kind of threats we face, how does that allows us to address terrorism?” Yoo asked the AEI audience. “What happens is there’s a real trade-off between those (pro-Congress) values and acting swiftly, quickly, and secretly.”
Not only is presidential control in war desirable, but according to Yoo’s interpretation, the Constitution supports it.
That’s about as convincing an argument as his torture justifications were and this guy is a law professor – at Berkeley. He’s still supporting torture, by the way, arguing against the McCain amendment with Alan Dershowitz’s widely debunked ticking time bomb theory:
“I think without designating constitutional power to the president, then the amendment would rule out any kind of coercive interrogation in a ticking time bomb hypothetical. And I actually have a hard time believing that people in Congress would want to completely prohibit anything more than oral questioning if we were in that kind of situation.”
And people wonder why we on the left suffer from Exploding Head Syndrome(tm) day after day over what these right-wing nutjobs spew.
They’re dangerous. Period.
