Speculation on the motivation for John Yoo's cover for presidential over-reach tends to define his role as "fixer." The reality is that the Office of Legal Counsel attorney was actively promoting patently illegal policy from the get-go, including choice of the prison location.
In response to the question What's your memory of Guantanamo? Why [send the detainees] there? What were the other choices? Yoo said:
"Well, there weren't a lot of good choices, and I think Secretary Rumsfeld called it the "least worst place" or something like that...
a related issue was whether the federal courts were going to get involved in trying to manage how the facility worked. And so in the past, the Supreme Court had said prison bases outside the United States, the territory of the United States, which house enemy prisoners at war would not be within the jurisdiction of the federal court system...one thing you want to be concerned about is having that kind of involvement while war is still going on.
Note Yoo's disparagement of the role of the judicial branch of government. Consider the consequences of his (later rescinded) opinions, and ask the question:
Would we be in this mess in the first place were it not for the the paradigm of "unitary executive" promoted by Berkeley Law's resident war criminal?
