Revenge Against the Nerds: Jose Padilla Sues John Yoo

Before I started paying very close attention to the Bush Administration's interpretation of the Constitution, I would have had no reason to know who John Yoo is, so I'm assuming that for most people reading this blog, his name won't ring a bell. John Yoo is one of the theorists behind the so-called "unitary executive theory." The unitary executive theory is the idea that the president of the United States is endowed with almost monarchic powers, powers which transcend that of the judicial and legislative branches. This theory is behind much of the Bush administration's shenanigans in the wake of 9/11; it set the groundwork for the American government spying on its citizens and for the detainment and torture of suspected terrorists (to mention but a few). All Americans should be familiar with the unitary executive theory, not only because it lead to many of the actions that the current administration took un-beknownst to its own people, but because the theory has set up an extremely dangerous precedent with respect to presidential power. American presidents (democrat or republican) will now have vastly increased, unchecked, and largely covert powers.

So anyway, John Yoo, Yale law graduate is not only one of the authors of this theory, but he's the author of the torture memos, the documents that made torture just legally acceptable enough to use as a tactic in the interrogation of enemy combatants. Jose Padilla, one of the early villains in the War on Terror, is an American-born Latino, Brooklyn gang member who converted to Islam. In 2002, Padilla was arrested at O'Hare airport on the grounds that he was part of a conspiracy to plant a dirty bomb in the United States. The charges were later downgraded to Padilla having plans to blow up apartment buildings. He was labeled an enemy combatant and held without recourse to legal counsel, deprived of sunlight, deprived of human contact, and all the attendant indignities to which enemy combatants have been subjected in the War on Terror. Well, now with the help of the Yale Law human rights clinic (irony of all ironies), Jose Padilla is suing John Yoo, along with Rumsfeld and Cheney.

What's striking and sort of novel about Padilla's lawsuit are two things: a) Yoo is being sued for his contribution to the shaping of the ideas in the torture memos rather than for any action (in terms of the enacting of torture tactics, the responsibility lays much more clearly with Cheney) and b) Yoo is a hateful, hateful nerd. In law school, him and David Addington (another member of the nerd cabal), as members of the Federalist Society wore pins with silhouettes of Alexander Hamilton on their lapels. Hamilton was the most conservative member of the framers of the Constitution, the one most invested in the idea of monarchy, and the most resolutely undemocratic. John Yoo has been a relatively behind-the-scenes guy at the Bush administration, but as more knowledge of his involvements in the re-drawing of the boundaries of presidential power come out, you'll get to see his smarmy, doughy face on tv a lot more.