You may have read that John Yoo had an op-ed in yesterday's Philadelphia Inquirer about the lawsuit brought against him on behalf of Jose Padilla.
I read it expecting a restatement of Yoo's familiar and long-discredited defense of executive power in a time of terror blah blah. But there's more than that: The magnitude of the total contempt for the most fundamental concepts of justice, from a top Justice Department lawyer and a Boalt Hall professor is staggering:
- He refers to the ordinary process of justice -- the filing of a lawsuit -- as "waging 'lawfare'."
- He dismisses Padilla's right to file a lawsuit by pointing out that he's "no innocent." Apparently "no innocent" means "no rights."
- Yoo points out that Padilla's conviction "did not even address" the dirty-bomb charges -- i.e., he's even guiltier than we know. That turns on its head the real issue, which is that he was held for years on the basis of allegations that the government had too little evidence to even bring to trial.
- He structures part of the piece around a strange parallel-lives idea between himself and Padilla: "Our lives had taken very different paths" (as if to suggest they had somehow started together) -- the main point of which seems to be that he (Yoo), being a good person, is simply not the kind of person who should be subject to trial, unlike Padilla, who "turned to drugs and crime in Chicago." He's a bad person. We lock up bad people.
- He warns, "Think about what it would mean if Padilla were to win." If Yoo's right that it's a frivolous or weak lawsuit, then what he's saying is that we can't allow the courts to consider weak lawsuits because we can't trust them to get it right. Why do we trust them to do anything?
All this is aside from his legal argument itself, which others can assess more capably. Why is someone whose view of law and courts is so contemptuous teaching at a reputable law school?
-- Mark Schmitt
