John Yoo's reward for justifying all-American torture is to teach law at Berkley and probably a Supreme Court nomination in the Jeb Bush administration. David Addington will serve, or actually receive salaries without showing up, on another dozen corporate boards for his advice and support to a Vice President who really brought the Vice to the title. Rather than being punished for sullying the reputation of the United States for all time, and conspiring to commit torture which carries a life in prison penalty, they will be lionized in the conservative anti-America. After all the commissions, all the hearings, all the findings, all the rhetoric, it is time for Congress to ACT! Either torture stands as the policy of the United States, bringing us lower than Libya in the international community, or torture is illegal, as has been found by our own courts who tried Japanese for waterboarding our soldiers in WWII. There is no way to restore our standing in world opinion to what is was on 9/12/2001. But we can begin to redeem ourselves, for ourselves. Or we can give up on ourselves, and give ultimate victory to the terrorists. The clock is ticking, and anything done after 1/20/09 is the act of cowards. I am not a coward, and I wish I had a government that represented me.

Yoo was only doing what he was told. Bush is the problem here and even more so, Dick Cheney. Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions (1977) prohibits: 'at any time and in any place whatsoever' violence including murder, mutilation, cruel treatment, torture and outrages to human dignity against protected persons - that is 'persons taking no active part in hostilities, such as civilians, the wounded and PRISONERS OF WAR. 'Such persons are in all circumstances, entitled to respect for their honour and religion, and must be protected against insults and public curiousity. No physical or moral coercion shall be exercised to obtain information from them or third parties.Reprisals against protected persons and ther property are prohibited'. You can see why Yoo was called in (Yoo hoo! Mr. Yoo). This is watertight and none of their evil plans could have unfolded under such restrictions.

But none of this started with Bush II. Bush I ordered the dropping of 90 thousands tons of bombs on Iraq in the space of 43 days in 1991. This bombing was in and of itself a violation of international law. The US deliberately took out 18 of 20 electricity generating plants and the water pumping and sanitation systems. It was no accident. Dr. Thomas Nagy of George Washington University studied declassified military documents and one entitled 'Iraq Water Treatment Vulnerablilites' dated January 22 1991 showed that the water in Iraq could be used as a de facto biological weapon because the rivers in Iraq were full of biological materials, pollutants and were laden with bacteria. 'Unless the water is purified with chlorine epidemics of such diseases as cholera, hepatitis and typhoid could occur.' In other words they planned for them to occur. Documents from a later date show that sanctions imposed after the war directly embargoed the importation of chlorine to prevent the purification of drinking water. All up the sanctions against Iraq were directly responsible for the deaths of 350,000 Iraqi children. America and Britain lied and claimed not to have banned imports of food and medicine to Iraq when they had done exactly that. They also banned exports from Iraq so that the Iraqi government had no money to buy food and medicine anyway. Iraq's legal foreign trade was cut by 90%. In the first years after the 2003 invasion of Iraq killings by Americans numbered between twice and ten times as many as the number of people killed by insurgents bombs. I'm talking about civilians here. William Langewiesche a correspondent for the 'Atlantic Monthly' described the American soldiers in Iraq as 'clumsy and overarmed'. Yoo was late on the scene. The contempt for human life that is so evident in America itself (the gun laws and no health insurance for a start) is what caused Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo and the invasion of Iraq. Bush II is totally responsible for the 'torture laws'. He issued a memo on September 17 2001 which vastly expanded the CIA's activities world wide and gave them permission to conduct covert ops without having to have them approved each time. That's where 'plausible deniability' kicks in. This memo also removed safeguards and constraints over the CIA's extraordinary rendition program. The presidential memo of January 18 2002 titled (with no irony) 'Humane Treatment of Al Qaeda and Taliban Detainees' drafted by John Yoo says that POWs from Afghanistan need not be given prisoner of war status and the US need not therefore abide by the Geneva Conventions. This was done to protect Bush's agents in the commission of war crimes from the federal War Crimes Act of 1996 which carries the death penalty. Yoo provided the bullets but Bush fired the gun and it was Cheney's gun. Couldn't end well.