Torture advocate John Yoo is again misleading the readers of the Philadelphia Inquirer

I’m a couple of days late on this, but I’ve got to point out that torture advocate John Yoo has — once again — mislead his readers in the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Yoo’s Sunday column was the latest in his series of public pronouncements on his “vindication tour” since the Justice Department decided not to sanction him for his work providing a legal rationale to torture terror suspects during the Bush Administration.

This time, his distortion comes in a description by the DOJ’s Office of Professional Responsibility, the office that investigated him for possible ethical violations in writing the torture memos:

Not only did OPR’s report reflect pure incompetence, it was obviously biased. OPR selectively tried to persecute only a few officials in the Office of Legal Counsel. OPR failed to interview, and reach conclusions on, the work of then-Attorney General John Ashcroft and other high-ranking officials, even though they received several briefings on our memos and approved them.

This is a finely phrased sentence that is narrowly accurate but broadly misleading. It’s true that the OPR “failed to interview” John Ashcroft and other high-ranking officials — but it wasn’t out of bias or incompetence or any intent to give Yoo the bum’s rush that it failed to do so. Instead, Ashcroft and other high-ranking officials refused to be interviewed by OPR. These were officials who, presumably, could’ve defended Yoo’s memoranda — but instead of noting the omerta approach that may have saved his bacon, Yoo tries to paint a (false) picture of the OPR dropping the ball.

It’s misleading. But we’re used to that from Yoo, aren’t we? He also misleads here:

Attorney General Eric Holder allowed his OPR to conduct a persecution that would placate the far left of the Democratic Party and its representatives in Congress – at the expense of the nation’s security.

This is Yoo again repeating his canard that the Obama Administration was pursuing him for unethical conduct, doing so as a sop to anti-torture lefties. But I’ve said this before and it bears repeating: 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. Yoo’s so-called “smear job” came under the Republican president. The so-called “vindication” came under the Democratic president. Yoo’s depiction of events here is simply dishonest. And he surely knows it.

There’s a difference between making bad, silly arguments and making misleading and dishonest ones. Yoo’s columns for the Inquirer consistently fall on the wrong side of the line. You’d think the Inky would have more care for its own credibility.

John Yoo is ‘vindicated’: Presumably he gets to keep his Inquirer job

Back when torture advocate John Yoo started writing columns for the Philadelphia Inquirer, opponents were given one hope: If Yoo ended up facing criminal charges or professional sanction for his discredited advice allowing the torture of terror suspects, the Inquirer might — maybe — reconsider publishing him. Inky editorial page editor Harold Jackson told me as much last year:

“We have not reached that point. The description of him as a war criminal would not be accurate. He’s a member of a distinguished university faculty with interesting things to say,” Jackson said. “If at some point it goes beyond that, we’ll have more concern about our relationship to him.”

So much for that. Late on Friday afternoon, the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility announced that Yoo didn’t commit “professional misconduct” — i.e. there’s not enough proof he acted unethically — and thus won’t face penalties or disbarment initiated by the Justice Department.

The Wall Street Journal claims in an editorial today that Friday’s decision amounts to “vindication” for John Yoo; the upshot of the Justice Department memo is that John Yoo didn’t commit ethical violations — it was a “close question”: Instead he produced a “flawed” justification for torture because he was too blinded by his own ideology to provide a fair legal analysis. The money paragraph:

The reason that John Yoo became famous enough to get his op-ed job at the Inquirer is because of his work on the torture issue in the Bush White House. But the Bush White House eventually conceded Yoo’s memos were flawed and withdrew them; the Justice Department has now pretty firmly repudiated the work and castigated Yoo’s judgement. It would seem that the Inquirer could find a smart conservative writer whose qualifications for the job don’t include clumsy and discredited justifications for war crimes. But maybe those folks are in short supply these days.

Then again, maybe the Justice Department memo enhances John Yoo’s standing. After all, the memo above suggests Yoo put “loyalty to his own ideology” above professional competence. That might well be why Brian Tierney has John Yoo writing for the Inky op-ed pages.

Why Michael Smerconish should remain Republican

Philly’s Michael Smerconish is making a splash this morning with his column announcing that he’s leaving the Republican Party after 30 years. And some of what he says makes sense:

The national GOP is a party of exclusion and litmus tests, dominated on social issues by the religious right, with zero discernible outreach by the national party to anyone who doesn’t fit neatly within its parameters. Instead, the GOP has extended itself to its fringe while throwing under the bus long-standing members like New York Assemblywoman Dede Scozzafava, a McCain-Palin supporter in 2008 who told me she voted with her Republican leadership 90 percent of the time before running for Congress last fall.

Which is not to say I feel comfortable in the Democratic Party, either. Weeks before Indiana Democratic Sen. Evan Bayh’s announcement that he will not seek reelection, I noted the centrist former governor’s words to the Wall Street Journal’s Gerald Seib. Too many Democrats, Bayh said in that interview, are “tone-deaf” to Americans’ belief that the party had “overreached rather than looking for consensus with moderates and independents.”

Where political parties once existed to create coalitions and win elections, now they seek to advance strict ideological agendas.

I’d say it a little differently. Something like: Where political parties once existed to create coalitions and win elections, they now exist just to win elections. The Democrats can’t actually execute their ideological vision, and the Republicans are only effective at pursuing the guns-and-bombs portion of their platform — the whole “party of fiscal restraint” mantra having long since been discredited.

But Smerconish is right that both the parties have become more ideologically homogeneous. And he clearly sees this as a problem. Which is why his solution — to register as an independent — doesn’t make any sense. It’s actually going to make the problem worse. Smerconish:

I will miss casting a ballot in the spring, as current state election law prohibits unaffiliated voters from voting in GOP or Democratic primary elections. Instead, I’ll join the others who bide their time until fall, when we can temper the extremes of both parties.

Here’s the thing: Fall is way, way too late to temper the extremes of both parties. Because independent voters can’t vote in the primary elections, that leaves only the most ideologically committed voters left to select their party’s nominee. Independent voters only have the extreme options to pick from at that point. In 2004, Arlen Specter narrowly won the GOP nomination over Pat Toomey — but in the following years, a huge chunk of the party’s moderates fled for independent and Democratic pastures. Specter left the GOP, leaving this year’s nomination by default to Toomey, a much more ideologically rigid conservative.

Michael Smerconish’s problem is that the parties are too ideologically narrow. But by leaving the Republican Party, he accelerates that process. He might not feel entirely comfortable in the GOP these days, but he’d have more of a shot at solving the problems he describes by staying.

A word about the Inquirer’s report on the Philly justice system and the future of newspapers

Just one thought about the Philadelphia Inquirer’s new series about how Philadelphia’s justice system is so broken-down that this city is a really excellent place to be a criminal: Journalism is important.

We’re shifting, right now, to a still-to-be-determined model of how to pay for and sustain journalism. It’s probably that big daily newspapers simply won’t exist in their current format anymore. And that a lot of the daily grunt work of information collecting will be done by smaller, scrappier organizations and indviduals.

But it is nice, on occasion, to have a big journalistic organization in your back yard willing to dig into its pockets and pay for home-run type journalism that makes a big and immediate impact on the way things get done in your city. Who knows if we’ll still have that in the future? Let’s enjoy it while it lasts.

PhillyGrrl says it better than I did

In this week’s print edition of PW, I have a column arguing that Brian Tierney’s “Keep It Local” ad campaign might be misguided; maybe Philadelphians would be better off with out-of-town bean counters running the local newspapers.

If he’s forced out, the “Keep It Local” campaign suggests, the Daily News will be shuttered and the Inquirer gutted into a fancier version of the Metro.

“Are you ready for a weakened news gathering force led by a management group with little or no connection to the place you live your life?” one ad warns.

Sounds awful. Too bad Tierney—the local owner—has already weakened his newspapers through layoffs and cutbacks, or the argument might have more force. But that’s not really a great sales pitch: Local ownership! We’re bad, but it could be worse!

One of my favorite bloggers, PhillyGrrl, takes up the cause this morning with a post of her own expressing deep skepticism about Tierney specifically and Philadelphia newspapers in general. And she writes a line I wish I’d written — and will probably plagiarize someday:

And you correctly point out that “Brian Tierney is a Philadelphia original.” Okay, but so was the Unicorn Killer. Big whoop.

Heh. But it’s important to remember that Brian Tierney is not a serial killer. He just writes paychecks to torturers. Different.

Brian Tierney doesn’t regret buying Philly newspapers. The rest of us? Another story.

Editor & Publisher:

He also contends he has no regrets about the investment he led three year ago to take over the Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News, stating the bankruptcy problems, ad and circulation revenue declines of the industry, and current bankruptcy do not diminish his goals.

“There have been a lot of challenges, but there are challenges in everything,” Tierney told E&P Thursday, two days after the latest bankruptcy hearing, which ended with PMH planning to submit its reorganization plan next week. “I am glad to play this role in this time in media history. I hope we are at the moment that we can look back at things 10 years from now and say local people stepped up, really stepped up.”

Well of course he’s happy. He got to take that big bonus while his employees were cutting back.

Rick Santorum is running for president!?!

Politico:

Add former Sen. Rick Santorum to the list of potential 2012 Republican presidential candidates.

POLITICO has learned Santorum will visit first-in-the-nation Iowa this fall for a series of appearances before the sort of conservative activists who dominate the state GOP’s key presidential caucuses.

The Pennsylvanian, who lost his 2006 re-election bid, will visit Iowa on October 1st, appearing on a Des Moines radio talk show and speaking to a luncheon and workshop of Iowa’s Right to Life group before heading east to Dubuque, where he’ll headline a fundraiser for the conservative America’s Future Fund PAC and then speak about the future of the GOP to a public audience in the Mississippi River city.

John Yoo’s other crimes? He’s dreadfully boring, dishonest and sloppy

John Yoo — and let his name never appear in these parts without “torture advocate” appended to them — finally made it back to the op-ed pages of the Inquirer yesterday. There’s been a lot of protest against Yoo’s column-writing gig at the Inquirer because a lot of people (reasonably, I think) don’t really want to spend their Sunday mornings curled up with a newspaper featuring the ponderings of a man credibly accused of war crimes.

But there’s another reason to hate the Inquirer’s (or rather, Brian Tierney’s) decision to give Yoo a plum gig, and it’s this: He’s dry to the point of unreadable.

Also he’s dishonest. Probably sloppy. But let’s stick with unreadable for a second.

Yoo’s prose reads like a lawyer trying to graft a legal memorandum onto a newspaper column format. Try this on for size:

Consider the recent decision in North Austin Municipal Utility Dist. v. Holder.

North Austin presented a case of “a small utility district raising a big question – the constitutionality of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote. Under the 1965 act, Congress prohibited denying the right to vote because of race and abolished tests, taxes, and other means of disenfranchising Southern blacks. States that had used these despicable methods were forbidden from changing election law without Justice Department approval.

Justice John Roberts wrote a lot in his opinion upholding — for now — the right of Congress to pass the voting law it did. But what part does Yoo quote? The description of the case (which any smart writer would reasonably paraphrase) instead of a line or lines that gets to the heart of Roberts’ thinking about why the law should be upheld.

Yawn. What boring writing.

As for dishonest, I go to Yoo’s decision to attack Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor with a truncated quote:

The panel included Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor, who has praised deciding cases with “empathy” and has said that “a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male” judge.

Let’s look at the full sentence that Sotomayor spoke, instead of Yoo’s truncated version:

Second, I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.

Perhaps I’m looking too much at nuance, here, but “I would hope” — which Sotomayor said, but Yoo omitted — changes the context of the quote to me. Yoo makes Sotomayor sound like she’s asserting wise Latina superiority, when the full sentence (and the fuller speech that she gave) is more humble, wrestling with how gender and race might affect one’s judicial outlook.

The nuance might be lost on Yoo — no surprise there — but it’s kind of critical. It’s the difference between Sotomayor being a racist and her pondering (perhaps clumsily) what difference her background might make to her judging. Yoo — no surprise here — weights his quotation in favor of depicting her as a racist.

And try as I might — and I’m willing to be corrected on this count — I can’t find evidence that Sotomayor has ever praised “empathy” as a desirable quality in judges. President Obama has said empathy was a quality he desired in a nominee (so presumably Sotomayor has that quality in a fashion the president desires) but I can’t find a quote from her saying the same thing.

How are the Inky’s readers served by John Yoo again?

Give Brendan Skwire a column at the Inquirer

Brendan Skwire has written an open letter to the Philadelphia Newspapers bosses, asking for his shot at a column in the Inquirer or Daily News. I say the Inquirer because that paper’s op-ed pages could use the livening up. But in any case, I think he’s spot-on in making the case.

I bring a perspective that none of the current conservative writers at the Inquirer (or for that matter the Daily News) can offer: not only am I a fire-breating lefty community activist who’s unafraid to take controversial stances, I’m a member of the working poor, and I dish it out to Democrats as well as Republicans. When was the last time any of your current columnists (collectively, a right wing lawyer, a right wing lawyer, and a right wing lawyer) had to choose between “heat or eat”, as I have done almost every winter for the past 4 years? Do any of these well-heeled writers really represent the views of the millions of working people (most of them Democrats) who live in Philadelphia? I think not. John Yoo’s taste for torture cheesesteaks when he visits the city is immaterial, and of all three, only Flowers lives and works in the city.

Philadelphians deserve a “true, outspoken and unapologetic liberal” as an alternative to your current stable of unapologetic conservatives, not just “career journalists who may tilt leftward on some issues but aren’t really “movement liberals”. And while I think many of the names Will Bunch offered are superb writers (especially Susie Madrak), it’s my blog so I’m making my pitch: hire me, and pay me what you pay Rick Santorum. I won’t let you down: as it stands I already generate more columns, of higher quality, and with better fact-checking, than Rick, John, and Christine put together (not to mention your other right-wing pundits Kevin Ferris and Michael Smerconish).

Brendan can be just a touch over-the-top for my tastes at times, but he’s a good writer, cares passionately about the community and he does actual reporting once in awhile. Plus he’d get people talking. The Inquirer could do a lot worse.

Will John Yoo be disbarred in Pennsylvania?

A liberal advocacy group calling itself the “Velvet Revolution” has initiated disbarrment proceedings against torture enabler/advocate John Yoo with the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. Phawker has the document here.

I do want to see Yoo disbarred — not because he gave advice I disagree with, but because that advice was professionally shoddy, bending the law past the breaking point in order to get the result he wanted. But I doubt Velvet Revolution’s filing is going to be the instrument of Yoo’s professional demise.

The New York Times:

A complaint filed last year against Mr. Yoo, a Berkeley law professor who remains a member of the Pennsylvania bar, was rejected by that state’s bar association, in part because the Justice Department was already investigating Mr. Yoo’s role in the interrogation memorandums.

Nothing’s really changed. The final Justice Department report on its investigation hasn’t been made public, though leaks suggest it will recommend professional sanctions against Yoo and other lawyers involved in clearing the way for torture. If Pennsylvania is waiting for the Justice Department to act, though, the Velvet Revolution filing will do nothing to push that process along.

Quick thought, though: John Yoo’s disbarrment would say a lot about the credibility of the Philadelphia Inquirer’s editorial page. His columnist contract there has been defended on the grounds that he has “profound insights” into the workings of the American legal system. If Yoo is formally found not to meet the standards of his profession, the only imaginable reason for retaining him as a columnist after that point would be pure political cronyism on the part of publisher Brian Tierney. It’s really that simple.