Digby: Immunization Program

Needless to say, Greenwald has the definitive overview of the DOJ IG report and Emptywheel has begun the examination of the deep weeds. Ackerman is breaking it all down into choice tasty bits for easy consumption. No need to reiterate any of that here. Just click those links for the full catastrophe.

I would just like to highlight one paragraph of Glenn's post simply because, to me, it is at the very heart of the issue:

These were not legal opinions in any sense of the word. What happened, instead, is clear: Cheney and Addington knew that Yoo was a hardened ideologue who would authorize anything they wanted. So they purposely chose only him -- a low-level Assistant Attorney General -- to be "read into" the program, and then used his memos to give themselves legal cover. The same thing happened in the realm of torture. This is what reveals how corrupt is the claim that Bush officials cannot be held accountable for the laws they broke because they had DOJ lawyers telling them it was legal. These legal opinions were anything but exercises in good faith. They were nothing more than bureaucratic cover to commit crimes, and -- as the IG Report makes clear -- ones that were as factually inaccurate as they were legally flawed (yet John Yoo remains on the faculty of Berkeley Law).