Dana Rohrabacher’s been saying stuff like this for years, only now he has an opponent who’s going to call him on it.

Today, the House Subcommittee on International Organizations, Human Rights, and Oversight held a hearing on detainee treatment at Guantanamo Bay, focusing on a recent FBI inspector general (IG) report documenting abusive practices at the facility. The report describes, among other things, a “war crimes file” created by FBI agents concerned about the interrogation tactics they witnessed at Guantanamo.

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), however, sees nothing wrong with the accounts of abuse. While questioning IG Glenn Fine today, Rohrabacher insisted the report documented nothing more than “fraternity boy pranks and hazing pranks,” and hardly constituted torture:

ROHRABACHER: They seem like more like pranks, hazing pranks from some fraternity than some well-thought-out policy of how do you torture someone and get information from them. […]

I will have to tell you, when most people hear the word “torture,” which has been bandied around here, I don’t believe that they think of it as holding a growling dog near somebody but not the growling dog – you know, it’s one thing to have the growling dog eating someone’s leg or arm versus – which is absolute torture. It’s another thing to have a growling dog around, or putting panties on someone’s head, or discussing – telling him he had repressed homosexual tendencies in his presence. I mean, I’m sorry, these are acts of humiliation.

He apparently used the phrase “panties on someone’s head” 13 times in 8 minutes.

I could go on and on about how interrogation practices at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo violate Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which ban “outrages upon personal dignity,” or the UN Convention Against Torture, or sundry torture statutes in this country, and how (as DoJ Inspector Glenn Fine said today) such tactics are not only criminal but incredibly ineffective in gathering intelligence, and how as the world’s most powerful nation we have an obligation to uphold the highest standards of human rights lest the world sink to our level, but fortunately, I don’t have to say all that this year, because Democratic nominee Debbie Cook is on the case.  Here’s the statement her campaign emailed me:

“At a time when we need a serious discussion and thorough review of the allegations of torture coming out of Guantanamo Bay, Congressman Rohrabacher has used his position of trust to make jokes and liken the interrogations to nothing more than a frat party.  

We need a representative in Congress who will approach the serious issues facing our country with decorum and common sense, instead of cracking jokes. Torture is not to be taken lightly especially when the prestige and moral authority of the United States government is at stake.  

The voters of the 46th district deserve a Member of Congress who works hard, has a good grasp of the issues before them and who is taken seriously by their colleagues. That’s how you get things done in Congress.”

Rohrabacher is an embarrassment, and Debbie Cook is going to give the people of the 46th District a real alternative this year.

At my home site I took a look today at John Yoo’s recently declassified memo, which is more responsible for torture and detainee abuse at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and throughout American prison sites abroad than practically any other document.

If you’re interested in weeping, you can read the 81-page memo yourself.

Part 1

Part 2

Yoo simply made up a new set of executive powers that trumped the Geneva Conventions, domestic statutes against torture, and virtually the whole system of the law itself.

If a government defendant were to harm an enemy combatant during an interrogation in a manner that might arguably violate a criminal prohibition, he would be doing so in order to prevent further attacks on the United States by the al Qaeda terrorist network. In that case, we believe that he could argue that the executive branch’s constitutional authority to protect the nation from attack justified his actions.

Kind of a “self-defense before the fact” belief, completely contrary to how the American legal system works […] The closed loop here is self-perpetuating.  The DoJ writes a memo saying that the President has virtually unlimited power in wartime.  The CIA and the Pentagon then takes the memo and uses it as proof of legality for their crimes.  So we have an executive branch validating the rest of the executive branch, essentially a one-branch government that writes, executes and adjudicates the law.

There is no question that John Yoo is a war criminal; he provided the legal theories that the executive branch follows to this day, even though the Defense Department vacated this particular memo in 2003.

Elsewhere in the piece I noted that Berkeley must be exceedingly proud.  Yoo is a tenured law professor who has been teaching at the University of California since leaving the Justice Department.  The UC, as we know, is a public university system paid for with 3.2% of the general fund budget.  Full professors there can earn up to $164,700 a year annually.

That comes out of my hide.  Your hide.  John Yoo is making his living based on public payments through taxes and other receipts.  And he is absolutely a war criminal.  (over)

John Yoo’s Memorandum, as intended, directly led to — caused — a whole series of war crimes at both Guantanamo and in Iraq. The reason such a relatively low-level DOJ official was able to issue such influential and extraordinary opinions was because he was working directly with, and at the behest of, the two most important legal officials in the administration: George Bush’s White House counsel, Alberto Gonzales, and Dick Cheney’s counsel (and current Chief of Staff) David Addington. Together, they deliberately created and authorized a regime of torture and other brutal interrogation methods that are, by all measures, very serious war crimes.

If writing memoranda authorizing torture — actions which then directly lead to the systematic commission of torture — doesn’t make one a war criminal in the U.S., what does?

I believe in academic freedom and understand the slippery slope of removing a faculty member with tenure because of their political views.  In a best-case scenario The Hague would be making the decision of when John Yoo leaves his cushy law professor job by dragging him off in leg irons.  But failing that, there has to be at least some standard of competence and dignity among a public university.  The shoddy logic and faulty reasoning in this declassified memo should be a firing offense alone; and the implications of that memo should be more than enough to cement that.  Not only is John Yoo teaching your kids about the Constitution and the law, we’re all paying him to do it.  And so at the very least the UC Regents need to hear from everyone in California, expressing their disappointment that they are harboring a war criminal at their flagship school, and determining what they will seek to do about that.

UPDATE: The American Freedom Campaign has a petition you can sign to demand this abuse of executive power.  It’s astonishing that it took the ACLU to force declassification of this memo rather than oversight from the Congress or the media.  As the AFC says, “Prosecutions may be appropriate.  Impeachment should not be out of the question.  But what is needed immediately is a thorough investigation into the Bush administration’s understanding of the extent of the president’s power as commander-in-chief. “