Yoo's On First: Let The Lustration Begin!

Lustration, n. --

1) The act or process of cleaning, purging, or purifying;

2) A rite or liturgy to cleanse people, cities, or armies that have been defiled through crimes or pestilence.

The end of the Bush Regime a little more than a year from now demands not just a transition, but a lustration. A systematic effort must be undertaken to uproot the thickly planted precedents for executive despotism, and specific policymakers should be subject to civil – where possible, criminal – prosecution for their crimes against the Constitution and specific individuals.

I'm not so naïve as to expect that any serious effort of this kind would occur within the Beltway, even if the Republicans are put to a well-earned rout at the polls this November. Neither branch of the Establishment Party has any interest in reducing the power of the Imperial Executive, as long as each side can count on getting to play with the presidential toys at least some of the time.

Once this is understood, the cravenness of the Democratic congressional majority in dealing with the Bush Junta's relentless assault on the rule of law is entirely understandable.

“In case after case, our political establishment has adopted the `principle' that our most powerful actors are immune from the rule of law,” writes the indispensable Glenn Greenwald. “And they've adopted the enabling supplemental `principle' that any information which our political leaders want to keep suppressed is -- by definition, for that reason alone -- information that is `classified' and should not be disclosed.... Thus, our establishment believes that any information that would shed light on whether our most powerful actors have broken the law is information that shouldn't be disclosed. In those accidental cases when -- via unauthorized leaks -- information is disclosed that demonstrates that crimes have been committed, our establishment bands together to insist that nothing be done, that there is no need to investigate or hold anyone accountable, and that the only real wrongdoing is by those `leakers' who disclosed the lawbreaking.”

“This is the same pattern seen over and over: leakers reveal that Bush broke the law for years by spying on Americans without the warrants required by law, and every investigation -- legislative and judicial -- is successfully blocked, and Congress then moves to legalize the lawbreaking,” Greenwald continues. “The top aide to Bush and Cheney, Lewis Libby, is found unanimously by a 12-person jury to have lied deliberately with the intent of blocking an FBI and Grand Jury investigation ... and is sentenced by a conservative judge to prison, yet is protected from jail time by the President while our media and political establishment cheer almost unanimously.”

Obviously, the bi-partisan Establishment Greenwald describes is not bent beneath the weight of its misgivings about the emergence of a dictatorial executive, and eager to feel the healing, astringent sting of an overdue purge.

However, there are venues beyond the Beltway in which life can be made very miserable for key architects of the Bush Regime's doctrines of limitless executive power. Perhaps nobody in that cohort had a more important role than John C. Yoo, formerly of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel. Yoo was the author – sometimes uncredited – of most of the important advisory memoranda that set out the regime's official ideology regarding undeclared war, torture, indefinite detention of terrorist suspects, and the unqualified supremacy the president.

Ideally, Yoo would be prosecuted by some appropriate court for his role in abetting the death of tens or hundreds of thousands of innocent people. (And ideally Yoo would share the dock with several people above his pay grade.) But it was his role in facilitating the imprisonment and torture of one man – Jose Padilla – that may land him in court.

With the help of the Yale Law School's National Litigation Project of the Lowenstein Human Rights Clinic, Padilla and his mother, Estela Lebron, have filed suit against Yoo.

The lawsuit contends that Yoo's memos provided the rationale and framework for the illegal, unconstitutional detention of a US citizen for three years and eight months, during which time he was subject to various kinds of physical and psychological torture.

“Defendant John Yoo, along with other senior officials, deliberately removed Mr. Padilla from due process protections traditionally available to US citizens detained by their government and barred all access to the outside world, including access to counsel,” notes the suit. Yoo and his colleagues devised “a systematic program of illegal detention and interrogation, which was specifically designed to inflict, and did inflict, severe physical and mental pain and suffering on Mr. Padilla for the purpose of extracting information from him and/or punishing him without due process of law.”

The object of the “interrogation” procedures used on Padilla – sensory deprivation, sleep disruption, stress positions, death threats, the forcible administration of psychoactive drugs, and prolonged isolation in a medieval-quality cell – was “to destroy Mr. Padilla's ordinary emotional and cognitive functioning in order to extract from him potentially self-incriminating information.”

Cruelty with a purpose: Although he was an entirely docile prisoner, Padilla was forced to wear sensory deprivation gear while surrounded by a phalanx of stormtroopers during a medical visit.

Although identified as a collaborator in a “dirty bomb” plot, and designated an “enemy combatant” on that basis, Padilla was never formally charged in connection with that purported conspiracy.

Padilla was eventually convicted of conspiring to “support” terrorism abroad. The key evidence in that trial consisted of transcripts of innocuous conversations in which – according to government “experts” -- Padilla and Muslim acquaintances spoke in “code” about terrorist activities.

The jury was also shown the equivalent of an al-Qaeda membership application Padilla supposedly filled out in Afghanistan in 2000. The five-page form contains several of Padilla's fingerprints. Given Padilla's prolonged, isolated confinement in the hands of military interrogators, it wouldn't be difficult to create reasonable doubt: At any point during Padilla's confinement an interrogator could simply have handed him that document, thereby securing an incriminating set of prints whether or not Padilla had ever seen that form before. We may learn more about this and other matters, since Padilla's conviction is under appeal.

It shouldn't be necessary to do so, but I'll say this anyway: Padilla, a one-time gang-banger and prison convert to radical Islam, is not a sympathetic defendant. He is an American citizen, however, and what was done to him could, in principle, be done to any other American. He served the equivalent of more than three and a half years in prison without being charged of a crime, and was the subject of a deliberate campaign to deprive him of his sanity.

John C. Yoo didn't order this; his role was that of a facilitator, a hireling tasked to devise rationales for tyranny.

His behavior was a bit like that of the Archbishop Canterbury in Henry V. Knowing that Henry lusted for war with France (in keeping with his dying father's advice to “busy giddy minds in foreign quarrels”), Canterbury eagerly seized a spectacularly flimsy pretext and swaddled it in a web of densely woven legalese intended to make it appear that Henry had not only the right but the humanitarian duty to attack France to assert his claim to its throne.

“May I with right and conscience make this claim?” inquired Henry.

“The sin upon my head, dread sovereign!” replied Canterbury, offering the answer required of him.

Yoo's is not the only head on which rests the sin of illegally detaining and torturing Jose Padilla. But Yoo's head is a target of opportunity.

Back to the future? A theatrical re-enactment of executions in the basement dungeons of the KGB's Lubyanka Square Headquarters illustrates what lies just a little further ahead for us -- unless the torture state is dismantled and its architects are punished.

It is difficult, but not impossible, to hold a public official civilly liable for the consequences of policy decisions. But if the lawsuit against Yoo were coupled with a campaign of professional and personal ostracism, it could inflict some genuine and well-deserved misery. And that might be enough to prompt Yoo to discover his conscience – or at least make him want to share the misery by disclosing as-yet concealed facts about the Bush Regime's reign of lawlessness.

Perhaps this is how lustration can begin: We find a particularly ripe pustule, and start to squeeze. Mr. Yoo, who suppurates corrupt self-satisfaction over his evil handiwork, is just begging for that treatment.

Dum spiro [cough cough] pugno!

The Padilla Precedent

"From this point on, you will enjoy no privileges of rank... no privileges of person. From now on, I will refer to you only as 'human.' You have no other identity."

I have no way of knowing whether that pronouncement, or something very much like it, was uttered by Jose Padilla's captors after he was taken into military custody five years ago. But it certainly summarizes the Bush Regime's view of Padilla, an American citizen (however disreputable) who has been stripped of all legal protection, not only of his due process rights but also of the basic integrity of his person.

Padilla, we were told in 2002, was the key operative in an al-Qaeda plot to detonate a radiological bomb. The "evidence" against him was provided by two identified terrorists -- Khalid Sheik Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah -- who implicated him after being tortured. A third "witness," Ethiopian refugee Binyam Mohammed (right), likewise named Padilla after being tortured extensively by CIA-aligned thugs in Morocco. Among the methods used to break Mohammed was the expert use of razor blades to make tiny but exquisitely painful incisions all over his body -- including his genitals.


After the bloody-handed simian who defiles the Oval Office designated Padilla an "unlawful enemy combatant," the Bush Regime consigned this American citizen to a Naval brig in South Carolina and systematically worked to destroy his will through psychological torture. A "Declaration" filed by a political hack named Michael Mobbs was presented as the functional equivalent of a grand jury indictment, and a separate "declaration" by Defense Intelligence Agency head Vice Admiral Lowell E. Jacoby was offered to explain why Padilla could not be permitted due process of any kind, including conventional legal representation.

"Any interruption of the intelligence gathering process, especially from an external source [such as legal counsel], risks mission failure," insisted Jacoby. The key to extracting intelligence from Padilla, he continued, was "creating an atmosphere of dependency and trust between the subject and interrogator.... Anything that threatens the perceived dependency and trust between the subject and interrogator directly threatens the value of interrogation as an intelligence-gathering tool."

How are we to know that Padilla was a valuable intelligence source about al-Qaeda, rather than, say, a trivial gang-banger from Chicago whose only serious professional training came at Taco Bell? According to Jacoby, it is enough for us to know that the Grand and Glorious Decider -- and let all stand hushed in awe-struck reverence at the mention of his name -- has "determined" that this is so.

Furthermore, according to Jacoby, "Padilla's capture and detention were the direct result of [similar] effective intelligence gathering efforts" -- you know, like the time those greasy perverts in Morocco took a scalpel to Binyam Mohammed's penis, prompting the victim to say that he would sign anything put in front of him, including a statement implicating a U.S. citizen he didn't know.

Until late 2005, the Regime insisted that Padilla had to be held in military custody indefinitely, because permitting him to be tried in our court system would (let's say it all together) undermine national security. But Bush and his comrades eventually released Padilla for trial when it became clear that the matter was headed for the Supreme Court, and it was possible that the administration could lose. This would imperil the asserted presidential power to designate any U.S. citizen an "enemy combatant" and imprison him in perpetuity.

So the Regime condescended to permit Padilla to have a trial -- on charges that had nothing to do with any of the matters supposedly verified by their "effective intelligence gathering efforts" -- you know, waterboarding, sexual mutilation, that kind of wholesome stuff.

Padilla's trial in Miami is winding down. There has been no mention of a "dirty bomb" plot. Prosecutors have made no mention of Padilla's personal involvement in any terrorist plot of any kind. He may be -- should be -- acquitted.

If so, notes the Christian Science Monitor, the Regime may very well "try to return him to the brig"; if that were to happen, armed insurrection for the purpose of extracting Bush and Cheney from power would not be an inappropriate response. After all, what other recourse would remain if our rulers can simply ignore an acquittal, and imprison a citizen found innocent by his peers?

The former -- seizure of Padilla despite an acquittal -- may happen. The latter -- a righteous armed uprising -- will not, precisely because it is the course of action that would be chosen in such circumstances by the patriots who created our republic. With a scant handful of worthy exceptions, we are not worthy heirs to the Founders' legacy. As the Monitor observed: "Although civil libertarians protested Padilla's detention without charge, there was no significant public outcry."

A likelier outcome would be a guilty verdict of some kind, with the jury thereby validating the Imperious Commander Guy's claim that he can declare any of us to be an un-person outside the law's protection.

This is what the entire exercise has been about all along, and it's why the Regime is determined to keep Padilla imprisoned for life. It would be completely horrifying, and utterly typical of our degenerate culture, if this crucial victory for the cause of Fuhrerprinzip were delivered not by a court or by Congress, but by a jury of common Americans.

I have no brief for Jose Padilla as an individual; he appears to be a standard-issue street thug who got the standard prison-upgrade to minor league Muslim fanatic. But there are gravities of loathsomeness, and Padilla is being used by people immeasurably more evil than he is to accomplish unspeakably vile ends.


Video Extra

The lengthy clip below is from the second part of a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode entitled "Chain of Command." In it we see Captain Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) captured by the militaristic Cardassians, undergoing "enhanced interrogation techniques" intended to help him develop a sense of "dependency and trust" toward his interrogator, the urbane Cardassian Gul (commander) Muldred (David Warner, doing magnificent work through ridiculous make-up).

Patrick Stewart, who played Captain Picard, has long been active in Amnesty International and other groups working against torture. At the time this episode debuted in 1992, some critics reacted with variations on the theme of: "Oh, torture is evil, you say? Well, duh."

It is a cause for sober reflection that a moral conclusion that seemed numbingly obvious in 1992 is now considered akin to sedition when spoken aloud -- and that the Regime ruling us today brazenly employs methods more barbarous than those used by the "Cardassians," who are among the most savage races ever depicted in science fiction.