Why Does the Inky Keep Publishing John Yoo the Torturer?
John Yoo Doesn’t Want the 9/11 suspects tried in New York:
Ownership of the disastrous decision to try al-Qaeda leaders in New York City federal court is the one clear thing to emerge so far from the Obama administration.
The call was not made “on the whims or the desires of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed,” the mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. told the Senate last week. Mohammed “will not select the prosecution venue,” Holder testified. “I will. And I have.”By contrast, the positive benefits remain obscure to the point of vanishing. All that is known for certain are the heavy costs:
…at which point he comes up with a number of excuses.
But the real reason John Yoo doesn’t want the trials held in New York is because they will be held in Federal courts. THAT means that all the “information” (and I use the term loosely) that was extracted by torture can’t be used. And that means that John Yoo and his peculiar theories will be even further discredited. Yoo admits as much:
If anything, their rights are at risk, not just by a failure to convict terrorists who killed almost 3,000 people, but by the inevitable judicial compromises that must balance the requirements of a fair public trial with the demands of protecting wartime secrets. Those compromises will no longer be limited to the special context of military courts in wartime, but will become part of the law that governs all Americans.
But here we see the torturer being given a platform in the Philadelphia Inquirer to advocate against process that will show how utterly bankrupt his theories are, as if he has no vested interest in the proceedings. Nowhere in the column or his byline is it remarked that John Yoo has deep conflicts of interest in writing about the 9/11 trials.
Brian Tierney and Harold Jackson, the published and op-ed page editor respectively, should be ashamed of themselves.
