A lot of this has been known for quite a while. I suppose this YOO dude would be an ideal colleague for SCALIA. Leave it to Alberto GONZALEZ NOT to be the original thinker behind the torture philosophy. YOO, author of the "Patriot" Act would be that.
But a refreshing note, William Howard TAFT IV, like Teddy ROOSEVELT IV, fine Conservative wine.
And look at BOYKIN's resume, a litany of disasters.
Can there be absolutely NOTHING that wakes wingnuts up? (& sorry but the Salon ad at the top of the first link is for "SAVED".)
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http://www.salon.com/opinion/conason/2004/05/22/yoo/index.html .... Conservative law professor
John Yoo, who has since returned to teaching at the University of California at Berkeley's Boalt Hall law school, wrote or co-authored crucial memoranda that encouraged the Pentagon and the White House to deny traditional protections to prisoners of war and detainees. ....
John Yoo's key memorandum on the Geneva Conventions, dated Jan. 9, 2002, argued that they should not be applied to prisoners captured in Afghanistan because the Taliban and al-Qaida had systematically violated the laws of war. ... According to an attorney who has seen the document, it was circulated to Attorney General Ashcroft; White House counsel Alberto Gonzales; David Addington, counsel to Vice President Dick Cheney; and Defense Department general counsel William J. Haynes. Less than three weeks later, Gonzales sent a memo to the president that endorsed Yoo's arguments and added new conclusions of his own, denigrating the Geneva restrictions on coercive interrogation as "obsolete" and "quaint" in the war on terrorism. ....
In a memo to Yoo disputing his views, the department's chief counsel,
William Howard Taft IV, warned against "repudiating
obligations under the (Geneva) conventions." ....
http://www.salon.com/opinion/blumenthal/2004/05/20/boykin/index.html
Saving Gen. William "Jerry" Boykin seemed like a strange sideshow last October. After it was revealed that the deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence had been regularly appearing at evangelical revivals, preaching that the United States was in a holy war as a "Christian nation" battling "Satan," the furor was quickly calmed. ....
Boykin was recommended to his position by his storied résumé in the elite Delta Force. He was a commander in the failed effort to rescue U.S. hostages in Iran in 1980, tracked drug lord Pablo Escobar in Colombia, advised the gas attack on barricaded cultists at Waco, Texas, and lost 18 men in Mogadishu, Somalia, while trying to capture a warlord in the notorious "Black Hawk Down" fiasco in 1993. .... "I knew that my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God and his was an idol."
Boykin was the action-hero side of his boss, Stephen Cambone, a conservative defense intellectual appointed to the newly created post of undersecretary of intelligence. Cambone is universally despised by the officer corps for his arrogant, abrasive and dictatorial style and is regarded as the personal symbol of Rumsfeldism. ....
With the Geneva Convention apparently suspended, international law was supplanted by biblical law. Boykin was in God's chain of command. President Bush, he told an Oregon congregation, is "a man who prays in the Oval Office." And the president, too, is on a divine mission. "George Bush was not elected by a majority of the voters in the United States. He was appointed by God." ....
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