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I had the opportunity to ask war lawyer John Yoo a couple of questions on Friday. The situation was not ideal, with someone else holding the microphone and deferring to the witness, and other people heckling, and other people shouting at the hecklers. Nonetheless . . .
I gave Yoo every opportunity I could to place a limit on presidential power. Can a president shoot missiles in the United States? Can a president drop nukes in the United States? Yoo refused to concede any limits.
Yoo used the example of shooting down one of the airplanes on 9-11 to assert that a president could indeed use drones to shoot missiles at suspected enemies within the United States, assuming of course that the president proclaims it to be "wartime."
So, can a president drop nukes in the United States? Yoo refused to deny a president even that power. He chose to respond by focusing on the example of Hiroshima, arguing for Truman’s rightful power to do what he did, but my question had involved dropping nukes in the United States, and Yoo’s answer made clear that he acknowledged no limitation on that power. Watch the video below.
11 Comments
Wow. Just wow.
I give you credit for even asking him that question. Most questioners would have been afraid to, if they’d even thought of it.
I swear he is begging for disbarment.
He’s always been confident that will never happen. And so far, he’s been right. What a disgrace.
Ever see the movie “They Live”?
John Yoo is a cunningly disguised alien from another planet walking among us, attempting to get us to destroy ourselves so that his alien species can someday invade, and colonize, with little resistance.
It’s a travesty that he’s not behind bars already…! Muchless, disbarred…! 8-(
SCORE! Yoonitary Yoo is a piece of work. I have previously cited his 2005 LA Times shocking proposal. False Flag Ops should be legal, but secret. But when these psychos release public proposals, maybe they have already been made legal, secretly.
If you can imagine it, Yoo’s president can “legally” do it
These are dangerous times, and if you tie a president’s hands by forbidding him to nuke the nation, I can’t see how you expect us to be safe.
John Yoo is the kind of man, with the kind of supple intellect, that isn’t afraid to stand up, usually in secret, for whatever the client wants and is engaging him to say.
That the Department of Justice is willing to publicly say that John Yoo appears to actually believes stuff is more the thing that’s embarrassing.
A normal person would say WTF of course. A person worried about a slippery slop bringing himself down will not concede anything cheap lawyer trick.
good question but, interestingly,
American Presidents already have dropped many nuclear bombs in the United States, hanging them from balloons, attaching them to towers, and dropping them from airplanes.
This was done repeatedly in the atomic testing grounds in Nevada, 80 miles from Vegas, and much closer to St. George Utah, and other small cities and towns in Utah.
around seven hundred times in fact.
US Military Tailors Mission Names To Target Audience
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/03/20/us-military-tailors-missi_n_506827.html