“John Yoo” on The Daily Caller

Former Bush administration official John Yoo debated the appropriate balance between security and civil liberties with former ACLU President Nadine Strossen at a Tuesday discussion hosted by the Heritage Foundation. (more)

Overruling two of his senior legal advisers — the Pentagon’s general counsel and the acting head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel — President Obama has decided that the U.S. is not engaged in “hostilities” in Libya. Obama has effectively nullified the War Powers Resolution (WPR), which requires the president to end hostilities within 60 days (with another 30 days to withdraw troops) unless he has received Congress’s authorization. In the Libyan war, the deadline for receiving Congressional approval or standing down passed on Friday. President Obama has done nothing to win Congress’s approval. (more)

(Via Ricochet.com) (more)

The first civilian trial of a Guatanamo detainee has come to its rip-roaring conclusion: a federal jury in Manhattan on Wednesday convicted Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani of one count of conspiracy in the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Africa — and acquitted him on more than 280 other counts. (more)

Nov. 3: (more)

The former Bush administration lawyer who drafted what his critics call the “torture memos” is reviled by many in this liberal East Bay academic enclave, a feeling that is mutual though not, Yoo insists, wholly unpleasant. (more)

The bar’s “priesthood” has been offended—and now they are on the attack. A group of 19 lawyers, including conservatives like former Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr and Bush administration lawyers Bradford Berenson and Larry Thompson, are denouncing Liz Cheney’s group “Keep America Safe” for asking questions about Department of Justice lawyers who once defended suspected terrorists. “We consider these attacks both unjust to the individuals in question and destructive of any attempt to build lasting mechanisms for counter-terrorism adjudications,” they wrote in a statement released earlier this week. (more)

John Yoo is celebrating the Justice Department’s finding that his Torture Memos did not violate standards of professional conduct, while calling investigators from DOJ’s internal ethics unit “incompetent” and “obviously biased,” and describing their probe as a “farce.” (more)