By Michael Winship
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
“John Adams,” that entertaining and instructive TV mini-series based on David McCullough’s biography, is a reminder that, in some respects, nations are created as much from rancor and ego as they are from hope and goodwill.
In the television version of the irascible Mr. Adams’s saga, democracy triumphs. Still, while watching it, I can’t help but be a little depressed by the thought that while the Founding Fathers sought to build a government of laws rather than men and were crafting such worthy documents as the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, the current administration’s legacy to history will be a series of documents that chose to subvert the very Constitution that Adams, Jefferson, and the others battled so hard to create.
These documents reveal themselves slowly and reluctantly, as if to acknowledge that those who wrote them know deep in their souls what they have done is wrong and antithetical to the ways of a republic.
The latest to ooze its way to the surface, thanks to a Freedom of Information Act suit by the ACLU, is the March 14, 2003, memo written by John Yoo, former deputy in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), an acolyte of David Addington, Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff and former Cheney legal counsel.
Contrary to claims the abuses at Abu Ghraib and other prisons were contrived by subordinates on the ground – i.e., “hicks with sticks” – Yoo’s 81-page memo rationalizes motive and establishes the bar for virtually every human rights violation that has taken place in the name of fighting the global war on terrorism.