But arguments that grant legitimacy to exceptions allowing torture are always wrong — much less when they form part of a formal petition asking the university to examine the question of sanctioning a tenured faculty member for his actions outside the university.

What Yoo did is so reprehensible because it was wilfully criminal — designed to “legalize” something Yoo knows cannot be legalized. Period. Not because it was the worst of the worst, although it was that, too.

The “ticking time bomb” crowd is to Yoo as a common thief is to a child molester. The thief and child molester are both in prison, but the child molester is at the bottom of the prison hierarchy. Yoo’s stance is so bad that even the “ticking time bomb” crowd should condemn him.

the role played by John Yoo in the Bush administration’s policy of subjecting to torture not high-ranking Al Qaeda members with information about ticking bombs but low-level prisoners irrespective of their guilt or innocence or of any information suggesting their guilt or innocence.

If you’re committed to the legally sound principle that all torture is criminal, then just get right to it: …policy of subjecting prisoners to torture.

It’s just as criminal to torture the guilty as the innocent. It requires just as much disregard for responsible, professional legal reasoning as Yoo showed.

Save your arguments about high-level al-Qaeda operatives vs. Afghan farmers for the one-on-one hallway persuasion.

It is bad to use the rack in ticking-bomb situations–to make the rack, in Blackstone’s words, an “engine of state.” It is much worse to make it a routine engine of the law…

Feh. Just like DeLong: huffy outrage, but selective.

Let’s prosecute instead.

This is a precedent that USC, Berkeley should consider. If the Justice Department considers it a criminal offense to issue a legal opinion in violation of the law, surely John Yoo will be indicted any day. Unless this is another law applied exclusively to Democrats.

And yes, they are shitting you.

Yoo’s actions are actions with horrific real world consequences, not random speech. I remain convinced that war crimes trials are far better than handling this in the university — and would spare its apparently scarce expertise in international relations, human rights, and moral philosophy. But this is bullshvt.

Not that I’m biased, or anything.