John Yoo’s lies of omission

John Yoo, torture advocate and enabler, back in the Inky with his latest op-ed. He is, predictably, crying foul over Eric Holder’s investigation of CIA officials who may have crossed the torture line while interrogating terror suspects.There are two major notes to make here:

• Yoo places Obama in a long line of Democratic presidents who betrayed the country’s security by reining in the CIA. Curiously, though, he never mentions why the CIA was reined in. Here’s a sample passage:

The Carter presidency serves as a warning. Attacking “Watergate, Vietnam, and the CIA,” Carter came to office determined to clean house. He and his CIA director, Adm. Stansfield Turner, fell in love with technical means of intelligence-gathering, such as the real-time photos sent by reconnaissance satellites. They saw little need for information gathered by spies and informants. Turner promptly took a buzz saw to the division in charge of covert operations, eliminating 820 positions out of 4,730.

The message was clear, and as a result CIA agents became risk-averse. After all, if you might be fired or prosecuted for doing something, the safest thing to do is nothing. America’s ability to gather human intelligence and conduct covert operations swiftly fell apart. The CIA failed to predict the fall of the shah. Iranian students – one of them now the president of Iran – took U.S. Embassy officials hostage. A covert operation to rescue them failed miserably, killing eight Americans.

Well, wait a minute. What was the “something” our intelligence services were doing? Was it merely trying to defeat the Soviet menace? Or was “something” else going on?

The CIA contracted a Mafia boss to murder Fidel Castro, sent biotoxins to the Republic of Congo with orders to poison Patrice Lumumba and tested LSD on unsuspecting citizens (one of whom jumped out of a window to his death). It fomented coups and bloodshed against democratically elected governments, while the National Security Agency, in coordination with the major telegram companies, read every single telegram coming in or going out of the country for three decades. The FBI infiltrated peaceful antiwar groups, breaking up marriages of activists with forged evidence of infidelity, while surveilling civil rights leaders with an assortment of bugs and break-ins. It even attempted to blackmail Martin Luther King Jr. into committing suicide, shipping him tapes of him midcoitus with a mistress and a note that said, “There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy, abnormal fraudulent self is bared to the nation.”

Ah. Right. The CIA, NSA and FBI were spying on Americans, testing drugs on Americans, ruining the lives of Americans … all in the name of national security. It’s not that the CIA was “doing something” that President Carter — like President Ford before him, incidentally, and with the cooperation of Congress — reined in: It’s that the intelligence community was doing bad things. They needed reining in.

Kind of like now. Which leads to my second point:

• The CIA officials being investigated aren’t the ones, like Yoo, who justified and enabled torture of terror suspects. It’s not even all or most of the CIA officials who participated in waterboarding and other torture techniques of terror suspects — as long as they stayed within the legal guidelines offered by the Bush Administration (and created in part by Yoo) Eric Holder doesn’t want to go after them.

The people who face investigation are the ones that violated the already-expansive standards set by Yoo and the Bush Administration. In other words: The law drew a line on torture. Yoo and the Bush Administration redrew it with a much wider boundary. And the people who are under investigation are the ones who crossed those new, wider lines.

And Yoo is defending those agents anyway.

Yoo can’t have it both ways. He can’t offer legal guidance that ostensibly is to guide CIA agents from crossing the real line into torture while at the same time exhonerating the agents who disregarded his guidance. If he does, what he’s frankly admitting is that his legal guidance wasn’t worth the paper it was written on — that it was simply a cover-your-ass document meant to make it seem as though torture had legal justification. In reality, these guys were going to do what they wanted to do, whether it was legal or not.