Bush Torture Czar: Don't Forget About Us!

Andrew Cohen has been keeping tabs on the criminally stupid John Yoo (author of the Bush torture memos):

Former government lawyer John Yoo taking credit on behalf of the Bush administration for the Navy Seals'  strike against Osama bin Laden is like Edward John Smith, the captain of the Titanic, taking credit for the results of the 1998 Academy Awards.

Yet front and center here is Yoo, the fallen author of the infamous torture memos, the man whose "flawed legal reasoning" and "professional misconduct" on the topic of "enhanced interrogations" nearly turned him into a criminal defendant, publicly pitching the case that he and his former bosses are "vindicated" by the way in which the Al Qaeda leader was hunted down and killed. Having long ago caught his finger in the hinge of history, Yoo is inexplicably back for more, clearly unrepentant about the terrible damage his consistently poor judgment cost the United States.

Yoo wants America and the rest of the world to know that "President George W. Bush, not his successor, constructed the interrogation and warrantless surveillance programs that produced this week's actionable intelligence." Got that? Yoo wants to transfer credit from the White House team that actually got bin Laden to the White House team that famously did not. He wants to do so despite good evidence to the contrary. And he wants to do so without any expressed accountability or remorse for the impact many of those extralegal Bush-era "programs" wrought upon our rule of law and  standing in the rest of the world. Abu Ghraib? What Abu Ghraib?

And here is Andrew Sullivan's take on that report:

So let us be very clear. The war criminal Dick Cheney presided over the worst lapse in national security since Pearl Harbor, resulting in the deaths of more than 3,000 people. This rank incompetent failed to get bin Laden at Tora Bora, and then dragged the US on false pretenses into a war in Iraq, empowering Iran's dictatorship, and killing another 5,000 more Americans on a wild goose chase. He presided over the deaths of more than 8,000 Americans, and tens of thousands of Iraqis during his criminally incompetent years in office.

On the other hand, the man who abolished torture as soon as he took office, Barack Obama, captured and killed Osama bin Laden, and captured a massive trove of intelligence, more than two years later. No Americans died in the operation.

What on earth are we debating? How have these delusional maniacs managed to even get us onto this turf? Because they have to. Because when the full truth of these past years are fully in focus, they will be revealed as some of the greatest criminals ever to have wielded power in America.

Couldn't have said it any better.