The much-ballyhooed John Yoo torture memo has been declassified. Madcap hilarity does not ensue. Among the spectacular legal assertions Yoo manufactured: the Fourth Amendment doesn’t apply to terror cases, even on domestic soil — in other words, warrantless wiretapping is A-OK! (N.B. that the notion of whether or not the Bill of Rights and the Constitution apply to foreigners in the U.S. is well settled law; they do, so it doesn’t matter if the person being investigated is a citizen, alien, illegal alien, or whatever.)

Further, Yoo’s imperial doctrine asserts that the President has the authority to simply abrogate laws that are in his way, such as those prohibiting harsh treatment of detainees i.e. torture. In this way, Yoo is directly responsible for at least some portion of the abuses found at Gitmo, in Iraq, and at undisclosed black sites maintained by the CIA around the world. N.B. what Wikipedia has to say about Authoritarianism:

Rule of law is frequently opposed by authoritarian and totalitarian states. The explicit policy of such governments . . . is that the government possesses the inherent authority to act purely on its own volition and without being subject to any checks or limitations.

John Yoo is, therefore, a WAR CRIMINAL, and ought to be in jail. Instead, he’s on the faculty at Berkeley Law.