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I've been listening to the talking heads on the right rant and rave all week that Democrats are hypocrites because they didn't speak up about this drone program from the Obama administration, and that is somehow equal to George W. Bush sanctioning torture. That if everyone is not equally outraged and calling for accountability or impeachment, they should just shut up because they're just partisans who don't really care about any of this if it means speaking out against their own party.

Examples like this one aren't helping the cause any. As Digby noted, we had Fox on the attack, quoting John Yoo and calling the Obama administration hypocrites, and then we were treated to Krystal Ball proving their point:

Today's Fox News Special Report showed footage of Candidate Obama in 2008 hotly condemning the Bush administration's extra-judicial terrorism policies and then the "all-stars" debated whether President Obama and all his supporters are hypocrites. It's hard to argue that there isn't some serious hypocrisy going on here. Unless you are Stephen "those WMD are there somewhere I swear it" Hayes who insisted that he is not a hypocrite, he's nothing but a pansy who's letting terrorists run free, I tell you, free! Everyone nodded solemnly. [...]

Meanwhile on MSNBC, Krystal Ball proves their point. She starts off saying that she's mostly "ok" with the drone program but thinks it needs more transparency and oversight. And then she discusses what really bothers her about the debate: the idea that we should have the same standards for all presidents. No, I'm not kidding:

Look, I voted for President Obama because I trust his values and his judgment and I believe his is a fundamentally responsible actor. Without gratuitously slamming ex-president Bush, I think he displayed extraordinary lapses in judgement in executing his primary responsibility as commander in chief and put troops in harms way imprudently.

President Obama would have exercised better judgment and he has exercised better judgment. The way it stands now the drone program is exclusively within the domain of the Executive. Their protocol, their judgement. So yeah, I feel a whole lot better about the program when the decider, so to speak, is President Obama. That's not to say that again the process shouldn't be codified, that there shouldn't be oversight.

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Keith and John Dean discuss some of the recent revelations from the torture memos now that they've been declassified and no surprise it shows Dick Cheney was lying. We're all shocked, right?

OLBERMANN: A classified CIA memo that Dick Cheney has insisted would prove he and President Bush were right to torture turns out to instead prove that the arrest of a terror suspect Cheney said was given up during torture actually took place before the torture and not after the torture. As the newly released Justice Department white wash of the Bush torture attorneys notes, Mr. Cheney‘s argument hangs on, quote, “plainly inaccurate information.”

Michael Isikoff of “Newsweek” reports the previously classified memo, quote, “significantly misstated the timing of the capture of one al Qaeda suspect in order to make a claim that seems to be patently false.”

The memo, cited by Dick Cheney, stated that the water-boarding of al Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah led to the arrest of suspected dirty bomb plotter Jose Padilla in May, 2003. But, as Isikoff also reports, the review points out that the memo was wrong. Padilla was arrested not in May, 2003, but May, 2002. The administration did not authorize enhanced interrogation techniques until August, 2002. Zubaydah was not interrogated until August of 2002. Therefore, he could not have led them to the capture of a man who had been arrested three months earlier.

The report goes further, stating that the head of the Office of Legal Counsel, Steven Bradbury, relied upon this plainly inaccurate information in two department memos, citing the CIA memo on Zubaydah‘s interrogation.

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I'm so glad Blitzer just thinks only "liberals" are going to be upset by this. And note to Wolf Blitzer, it's not "enhanced interrogation". Waterboarding is torture. Jonathan Turley gave a much more honest assessment at his blog and on Olbermann's show -- Justice Department Declines Punishment for Bush Officials for “Bad Judgment”

The Justice Department confirmed that the investigation originally found professional misconduct by Yoo and Bybee, but an unnamed high-ranking official at the Office of Professional Responsibility overruled the finding to avoid any professional action against them.

[...]

Now the report merely states that the men “exercised poor judgment.” That is a remarkable downgrade from the Nuremberg prosecutions of lawyers and judges for war crimes to the Obama Administration saying that support of torture is a matter of “poor judgment.” Poor judgment is when you invite the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre and Susan Brady to a small dinner party. Arguing for torture and misrepresenting settled law to facility a torture program is usually viewed as something of a slightly higher order than “poor judgment” or “bad form.”

From CNN -- Report clears Bush officials of misconduct over 'torture' memos:

Bush administration lawyers who wrote "torture" memos have been cleared of allegations of professional misconduct after a Justice Department internal investigation, which recommends no legal consequences for their actions.

The report by the Justice Department concludes the high-ranking lawyers who developed controversial legal guidance on waterboarding and other enhanced interrogation techniques may have exercised poor judgment, but not professional misconduct.

The conclusion resulted from a decision by top career Justice Department executive David Margolis to reverse a recommendation of investigators that found the two lawyers' legal memos did constitute professional misconduct. That tentative conclusion, which was overruled by Margolis, said the lawyers should be referred to their state bar associations for potential disbarment.

But in the final report, the examination of the legal guidance written by Justice Department lawyers John Yoo and Jay Bybee found they did not constitute a professional breach that could have led to state disbarment. Read on...

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January 12, 2010 FOX & Friends

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October 20, 2009 PBS News Hour

The tenure of Berkeley law professor John Yoo has come under fire amid a backlash over the role he played in the Bush administration, advising on the legalities of now-controversial interrogation tactics used on terror suspects. Spencer Michels reports.

SPENCER MICHELS: Since the beginning of the school year, protesters dressed as prisoners or detainees have dogged law professor John Yoo at the University of California at Berkeley. They want the university to fire him for advising the Bush administration, as an attorney in the Justice Department, that it could legally torture suspected terrorists to get information.

PROTESTER: This is a not just a question of academic opinions. This is a question of war crimes. People like John Yoo, these people should be fired.

SPENCER MICHELS: Forty-two-year-old John Yoo has taught here since 1993, except for 2001 to 2003, when he worked for the Justice Department in the Office of Legal Counsel.

During those years, after 9/11, the U.S. was interrogating prisoners, suspected terrorists, at places like Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Yoo wrote several memos on how far the interrogators could go in pressuring prisoners to reveal information. Those memos argued that techniques such as water- boarding, sleep deprivation, and exploiting a detainee's fear of insects were, in fact, legal.

Yoo's actions have reverberated throughout Boalt Hall, the Berkeley law school where Yoo teaches. Students and faculty are debating the bounds of academic freedom, and whether a professor should be held responsible for controversial work done outside the university.

DAVID ARABELLA, law student: I believe that he does have a right to teach here, because people can have controversial views. But, personally, I'm not going to enroll in his class.

SPENCER MICHELS: The law school dean, Christopher Edley, who has served in several Democratic administrations, has been besieged by messages, the majority against Professor Yoo.

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Australian comedy show The Chaser's War on Everything travel to the United States to visit a couple of the more well-known torture proponents, John Yoo and Dick Cheney. Donning a familiar costume, Yoo is confronted while giving a lecture in a classroom. Yoo lectures at UC Berkley and Chapman, and was a key member of the Bush administration's justification of torture. (A complete mystery as to why Yoo isn't in jail yet, but as Richard Armitrage advised, it's probably not a good idea for Yoo to travel outside the United States.)

And in another familiar costume, our intrepid faux reporters travel to Dick Cheney's bunker compound house to get some unpaid royalties. Unfortunately Dick wasn't at home, and it wasn't long before local authorities and the Secret Service were called in to intervene.

This clip is from their July 15th show. They came to prominence with American audiences during the 2007 APEC conference.

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David Shuster and Harper's Scott Horton break down John Yoo's poorly written op-ed at the Wall Street Journal, defending his part in allowing the Bush administration to spy on millions of Americans under the guise of keeping us safe from terrorists.

From The Anonymous Liberal--John Yoo: Still Lying:

In this morning's Wall Street Journal, John Yoo has an op-ed defending himself from the malpractice charges set forth in the recent Inspecter General's report. As with the opinions themselves, the op-ed is deeply disingenuous and misstates the law repeatedly.

Not surprisingly, Yoo begins the op-ed with a collosal straw man. He points out how important it is to intercept al Qaeda communications and writes: "Evidently, none of the inspectors general of the five leading national security agencies would approve." Of course, the issue is not whether intercepting communications is a good idea, but whether the program violated the law. Yoo was not a policy maker. He was a lawyer. His job was to state what the law was, not what it should be.

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From Think Progress-- In Op-Ed Attacking IG Report, John Yoo Never Mentions That He Refused To Cooperate With The Investigation:

Last week, the Inspectors General of five separate intelligence agencies released a congressionally-mandated report on the Bush administration’s post-9/11 surveillance programs. The report focuses much of its criticism on John Yoo, a former deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel, who wrote “legal memos undergirding the policy.”

In the Wall Street Journal today, Yoo responded to the report, claiming that the inspectors general are ignoring history and are simply “responding to the media-stoked politics of recrimination.” But in his attack on the report, Yoo neither responded to the specific criticisms of his legal reasoning nor mentioned that he refused to cooperate with the investigation.

Instead, Yoo persisted in pushing the flaws in his legal argument, such as the claim that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act did not take war into consideration.

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Scott Horton has more at The Daily Beast--Torture Prosecution Turnaround?:

The attorney general is leaning toward appointing a special prosecutor to investigate Bush-era torture policy, sources tell Scott Horton. Inside the logic driving Eric Holder’s possible conversion.

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June 15, 2009 Rachel Maddow Show

Maddow: But first, it‘s time for a couple of holy mackerel stories in today‘s news. First up, the richest vein of news for the week is often late in the day on Friday. And late in the day this past Friday a federal judge in San Francisco ruled that John Yoo, the most notorious of all the Bush administration torture memo authors, is going to have his day in court.

Mr. Yoo is being sued by a U.S. citizen who was once declared an enemy combatant by the Bush administration. That man, Jose Padilla says that Mr. Yoo effectively created the torture program in which Mr. Padilla was severely physically abused while in custody as an enemy combatant.

Mr. Padilla is only speaking $1.00 in damages from Mr. Yoo. What he really wants is a court order declaring that his treatment was illegal and unconstitutional. John Yoo had asked that the case him be dismissed on the grounds that he was acting as a government official when he wrote the torture memo and he should be therefore be immune from getting sued.

But the judge in the case, incidentally, a judge appointed by George W. Bush disagreed with Mr. Yoo, ruling that, quote, “Like any other government official, government lawyers are responsible for the foreseeable consequences of their conduct.”

The judge also ruled that Mr. Padilla had, quote, “alleged sufficient facts to satisfy requirements that Mr. Yoo set in motion a series of events that resulted in the deprivation of Mr. Padilla‘s constitutional rights.”

So the lawsuit against torture memo guy John Yoo proceeds. Do you want to know who is defending John Yoo in this lawsuit? You, not “Yoo” as in John Yoo, but “you” as in you and me. We‘re defending him.

The Justice Department of the United States is providing John Yoo‘s defense. We‘re paying to defend the torture guy with our tax dollars. I wonder if we can vote on that.

Finally, if you pay any attention to the tapes that are released periodically by al-Qaeda, by the As-Sahab, which is the al-Qaeda AV club, you might have noticed that in the last couple of years, As-Sahab was taken over by the American kid in al-Qaeda, known variously as Azam al-Amriki, a.k.a. Azam the American, a.k.a. Adam Gadahn. He‘s the chunky former Death Metal-loving dork from a California goat farm who renounced the United States and famously ripped up his U.S. passport on an al-Qaeda video. Ooh, like, we‘ll miss you.

In a surprise development concerning Mr. Gadahn, in a recording released over the weekend, Mr. Gadahn, Mr. al-Amriki, Mr. Azam, the American, came out as Jewish. Yes.

In a new As-Sahab tape, he admits that his grandfather was Jewish, that his grandfather gave him a copy of a very bad book once by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. And he says his grandfather encouraged young Adam to get Israeli citizenship. This admission, of course, will probably make things really awkward at the next al-Qaeda mixer. I‘m just guessing.

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Keith talks to Scott Horton about his article in Harpers Magazine, George W. Bush’s Disposable Constitution.

Yesterday the Obama Administration released a series of nine previously secret legal opinions crafted by the Office of Legal Counsel to enhance the presidential powers of George W. Bush. Perhaps the most astonishing of these memos was one crafted by University of California at Berkeley law professor John Yoo. He concluded that in wartime, the President was freed from the constraints of the Bill of Rights with respect to anything he chose to label as a counterterrorism operations inside the United States.

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Rachel Maddow talks to Michael Isikoff about his latest article in Newsweek, Torture Report Could Spell Big Trouble for Bush Lawyers.

An internal Justice Department report on the conduct of senior lawyers who approved waterboarding and other harsh interrogation tactics is causing anxiety among former Bush administration officials. H. Marshall Jarrett, chief of the department's ethics watchdog unit, the Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR), confirmed last year he was investigating whether the legal advice in crucial interrogation memos "was consistent with the professional standards that apply to Department of Justice attorneys." According to two knowledgeable sources who asked not to be identified discussing sensitive matters, a draft of the report was submitted in the final weeks of the Bush administration. It sharply criticized the legal work of two former top officials—Jay Bybee and John Yoo—as well as that of Steven Bradbury, who was chief of the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) at the time the report was submitted, the sources said. (Bybee, Yoo and Bradbury did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)

But then–Attorney General Michael Mukasey and his deputy, Mark Filip, strongly objected to the draft, according to the sources. Filip wanted the report to include responses from all three principals, said one of the sources, a former top Bush administration lawyer. (Mukasey could not be reached; his former chief of staff did not respond to requests for comment. Filip also did not return a phone message.) OPR is now seeking to include the responses before a final version is presented to Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. "The matter is under review," said Justice spokesman Matthew Miller.

If Holder accepts the OPR findings, the report could be forwarded to state bar associations for possible disciplinary action. But some former Bush officials are furious about the OPR's initial findings and question the premise of the probe. "OPR is not competent to judge [the opinions by Justice attorneys]. They're not constitutional scholars," said the former Bush lawyer. Mukasey, in speeches before he left, decried the second-guessing of Justice lawyers who, acting under "almost unimaginable pressure" after 9/11, offered "their best judgment of what the law required."

You can read the rest of the article here as linked above: Torture Report Could Spell Big Trouble for Bush Lawyers.