clipped from www.washingtonpost.com

How to keep future John Yoos under control

During the long years that the Justice Department was investigating Jay S. Bybee and John C. Yoo, it was tempting to view the torture memos as if they were momentary aberrations in the life of the modern presidency. But in clearing the Bush administration lawyers who authored the memos of all charges of unprofessional conduct, the department invites future John Yoos to rubber-stamp future presidential abuses at moments of (real or imagined) crisis.

The torture memos are an entirely predictable product of an institutional set-up that puts the meaning of national security law at the mercy of a politicized Office of Legal Counsel and a super-politicized legal staff in the White House. There is a compelling need to reform that structure.