Terrorist watch list

By Mustang Bobby

John Yoo is one of those people who will go down in history as one of those benignly evil people who don’t actually do terrible things like commit torture or genocide themselves but enable those who do and defend them:

"Apparently the FBI interrogated the younger Tsarnaev for 16 hours," wrote torture memo author John Yoo at National Review. "And then, for reasons that are still unknown, the government read him his rights."

Yoo has never met a right he didn't want to ball up like a piece of paper and toss into a trash can in the name of national security. But despite being an attorney and professor at the prestigious University of California Berkeley School of Law, Yoo is either misleading his readers about why Tsarnaev was read his rights or unaware of a basic legal rule.

The judge appeared at the hospital because the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure state that suspects have to be brought before "a magistrate judge, or before a state or local judicial officer" and it must be done "without unnecessary delay." The Supreme Court has held that, absent exigent circumstances or the suspect waiving the right to go before a judge -- as wannabe Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad reportedly did -- a suspect has to appear before a judge within 48 hours of being apprehended. This is usually referred to in legal shorthand as "presentment," as in, "presentment before a judge."

He is also one of those people who tell us that our rights and the Constitution don't really matter if you're dead, and that the Founding Fathers certainly didn't intend to protect the rights of people who were indoctrinated by foreigners to blow us up. And he does it all without getting that faraway stare in his eyes or wearing a hat with teabags dangling from it.

He's the one who should be on the terrorist watch list.

(Cross-posted at Bark Bark Woof Woof.)