Torture advocate and Inky columnist John Yoo is a big fat liar

Torture advocate (and Inquirer columnist)  John Yoo takes to the pages of the Wall Street Journal today to crow about his “vindication” in a Justice Department investigation that decided he was merely incompetent, not willfully unethical, in signing off on the Bush-era torture memos. And true to Yoo’s style, he distorts and politicizes the situation to create an entirely false narrative of his own victimization.

Obama came to office, he said, planning to break sharply with Bush-era precedents on torture:

In my case, he let loose the ethics investigators of the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) to smear my reputation and that of Jay Bybee, who now sits as a federal judge on the court of appeals in San Francisco.

This would seem to suggest that Obama launched the OPR investigation of Yoo and Bybee. But that’s not true: Yoo’s work was so bad that the OPR investigation started during the Bush Administration — and the initial, much more devastating findings, were also reached during the Bush Administration, as Yoo himself demonstrates when talking about the timeline:

Attorney General Holder could have stopped this sorry mess earlier, just as his predecessor had tried to do. OPR slow-rolled Attorney General Michael Mukasey by refusing to deliver a draft of its report until the 2008 Christmas and New Year holidays. OPR informed Mr. Mukasey of its intention to release the report on Jan. 12, 2009, without giving me or Judge Bybee the chance to see it—as was our right and as we’d been promised.

Get this straight: The so-called “smear job” came under the Republican president. The so-called “vindication” came under the Democratic president. I have my disagreements with that, but for Yoo to portray this process as “fighting off an administration hell-bent on finding scapegoats for its policy disagreements with the last president” is purely and completely dishonest.