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Yoo's bad lawyering, not investigations, threatens CIA
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Protesters confront John Yoo. (AP Photo/Noah Berger)
Bush administration lawyer John Yoo's latest screed in the Philadelphia Inquirer relies on false arguments and conservative intelligence folklore to blast John Durham's inquiry into CIA's torture program. Yoo bemoans the "decimation" of US intelligence capabilities and the "persecution" of CIA, but predictably takes no responsibility for how his own egregiously sloppy legal advice exposes to legal jeopardy the military and intelligence personnel whom he unctuously praises.
Apparently, Yoo's reading of history is about as good as his lawyering, which has taken lumps from nearly every quarter.
Yoo summons up that old chestnut "Gentlemen do not read each other's mail," uttered by Herbert Hoover's Secretary of State, Henry Stimson, and then adds his own rejoinder.
"Unfortunately," writes Yoo, attempting to duct tape some historical legitimacy to his assertion, "we do not live in a world of gentlemen."
Yoo is putting forth a false choice. Yoo would have readers believe that amidst the vast machinery of US intelligence and defense, there was only one alternative to the program of torture and extrajudicial detention he helped justify: doing nothing.
Yoo's argument rests on the assumption that Al Qaeda is an implacable global menace of unfathomable depth and lethality, which could only be confronted by turning US intelligence to 'the dark side.'
It turns out that Al Qaeda is not the indestructible juggernaut it was once thought to be, and while still potentially lethal, it has crumbled partly under Western pressure, but mostly because of its own internal problems. The Guardian reported last week that according to terrorism experts, Al Qaeda has been whittled down to a few hundred members by a coordinated campaign of electronic surveillance and drone strikes, as well as by a tired message that has lost its steam across the Muslim world.
Meanwhile, torture and detention appear to have played a negligible role in pushing back Al Qaeda--even former CIA Director Michael Hayden has said that the program has achieved only "modest success" in cracking the the secrets of Al Qaeda leadership and organization.
The record shows now that torture and detention never stopped any Al Qaeda attacks on the United States, and did little to stop a campaign of Al Qaeda attacks on US allies, including the United Kingdom and Spain. If anything, the program Yoo persists in championing has been a propaganda victory for Al Qaeda and its like-minded sympathizers around the world. Yoo also does not address how the program he helped engineer has destroyed US credibility and leadership in human rights and democracy promotion activities on the world stage.
Yoo's latest Inquirer op-ed also resorts to old conservative folklore, which argues that frivolous legal restrictions on US intelligence activities enacted in the seventies in the wake of Watergate and congressional inquiries into CIA, FBI, and military intelligence excesses have reduced the effectiveness of US intelligence.
One problem with this old canard is that it posits that US intelligence actually was more effective back in the days of yore, before formal congressional oversight and proscription of spying on Americans and assassinations. The fact-based historical record, of course, tells a different story: intelligence fiascos and failures have always been with us, even when FBI had a carte blanche to conduct hamfisted covert 'dirty tricks' campaigns against Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders, and even as CIA botched assassination plots, staged third world coup d'etats, and dropped acid (the psychedelic kind) on unsuspecting Americans.
The other problem with Yoo's recitation of this old conservative warhorse is that oversight and regulation of intelligence hasn't really curbed intelligence excesses. The Iran-Contra scandal, for example, took place against the backdrop of congressional oversight and a regime of legal restrictions. It's also hard to link some of the most embarrassing intelligence failures of the past couple decades--for example, the inadvertent bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, the surprise of 9/11, non-existend Iraqi WMDs, and sloppy terrorist renditions--to intelligence weaknesses induced by cumbersome laws and oversight.
By citing this single-factor explanation of US intelligence woes, Yoo weaves his own misdeeds into the conservative 'stab in the back' narrative, but overlooks the obvious cultural and institutional problems that afflict CIA and other US intelligence agencies.
But if Yoo really, really feels bad about the "persecution" of CIA, he should put his money where his mouth is.
Instead of using his Philidelphia Inquirer soapbox to defend his own indefensible legal justifications of a morally indefensible torture program, maybe Yoo could just offer to take the investigative heat for the brave men and women of CIA.
If an inquiry into CIA personnel will lead to, as Yoo puts it, "another surprise attack or major intelligence failure," wouldn't it be better for the security of the Republic if the policy makers who authored the subject of inquiry stepped forward, you know, for the good of the country?
John Yoo could stop, or at least mitigate, the persecution by taking courageous action. Whining from an op-ed soapbox is insincere in comparison.
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