But, hold on now, this is not about an investigation of the CIA. That's John Yoo's smoke-screen. This is about a bunch of highly-educated but ideologically-challenged lawyers who exploited our post-9/11 hysteria to try to rewrite the Constitution.
Paradoxically, it is precisely during times of such hysteria that we most urgently need the Constitution and its principles of fairness and equity. Resisting - not caving to -- the temptation to compromise those principles would have been the benchmark for discovering those who truly believe.
I first came across David Cole several years ago, when he was doing a lot of advocating on behalf of donors to Muslim-oriented charities whose organizations were shut down by our Treasury Department with virtually no legal due process on vaguely-defined suspicions that they were supporting terrorist causes.
Cole likened that situation to the guilt-by-association tactics of the McCarthy era. He never weighed in on the guilt or innocence of those charities. But he was downright bulldoggish in his insistence that this was precisely the time we should apply the rule of law - not the law of the Wild, Wild, West soundbite. A position the Obama Administration has now also embraced.
For me, that defines a lawyer's lawyer. For our country, it defines the future of our Constitution and the sacred legal structures that keep us from flying apart.
John Yoo is far from any lawyer's lawyer.
("The Torture Memos: Rationalizing the Unthinkable", by David Cole, Published by The New Press, September 8, 2009.)
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