Today’s torture post: Why does the Inky keep giving op-ed space to John Yoo?

We realize that the op-ed pages of the Philadelphia Inquirer are never going to share our politics. We’re ok with that. Really. Diversity is the spice of life and all that.

Still, we wonder why the Inky keeps giving op-ed space to John Yoo. Yoo, of course, is the Bush Administration lawyer who wrote many of the memos giving legal cover to the president for acts of torture against terror suspects. He left the administration to become a law professor at Berkeley, which supposedly makes him an authority on matters of the law.

Except…

Yoo’s memos were so over-the-top bad in their reasoning that they were later withdrawn by the Bush Administration. And they were so over-the-top bad that an internal Justice Department report — again, initiated by the Bush Administration — is reportedly recommending that Yoo lose his license to practice law.

In other words: Yoo is controversial not merely because he has controversial ideas. He’s controversial because his shoddy work was below the standards of his profession. All of this is common knowledge, even if no formal action has yet been taken.

So the question remains: Why would the Inquirer be putting this man forth as a font of authority to its readers? Particularly when the op-ed in question — a critique of Obama’s promise to put an empathetic judge on the Supreme Court — contains nothing but some standard conservative talking points.

In his 2005 confirmation hearings, Roberts compared judges to neutral umpires in a baseball game. Sen. Obama did not vote to confirm Roberts or Alito, but now proposes to appoint a Great Empathizer who will call balls and strikes with a strike zone that depends on the sex, race, and social and economic background of the players. Nothing could be more damaging to the fairness of the game, or to the idea of a rule of law that is blind to the identity of the parties before it.

Yoo is right, of course, that you don’t want judges making decisions based on who can offer up the most puppy-dog heartbreaking story in front of the Supreme Court. We are a nation of laws, not men.

And yet: Let us suggest that the work done by Yoo and his colleagues Jay Bybee and Steven Bradbury offer up a perfect example of why some minimal level of empathy is a good and necessary quality to have when interpreting the law. Because their rationales for waterboarding and other practices are based quite explicitly in a lack of empathy that should be alarming to anybody who doesn’t want their government to torture. Read the memos. They make the case that no “reasonable person” would experience pain and suffering as a result of waterboarding, stress positions or sleep deprivation. There is, of course, sophistry at play here: The Bush Administration wanted to make these guys feel so bad that cooperating would seem a better choice, yet it had to be seen as trying to avoid making these guys feel so bad that actual pain and suffering would result. It’s a contradictory set of ideas that doesn’t stand up.

In any case, because the law in this case is so dependent upon the perceptions of the victim, a little empathy — How would I feel if I hadn’t been allowed to sleep for 11 days? How would I feel if I’d been waterboarded 183 times in one month — might’ve led Yoo and his colleagues to the correct legal position. Instead, they rightly face the prospect of losing their careers.

We know that the Inquirer is paying former Sen. Rick Santorum an astounding amount of money for his obnoxious columns. We’re curious what Yoo is earning for his writing. We’re not sure we want to know.

(Hat tip: Phawker)