As Dick Cheney and the usual suspects circle the wagons to defend the Bush Torture Team, one its most notorious members has been particularly active in rhetorically waterboarding the Senate torture report. On Tuesday, John Yoo , who at the Bush Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel defined torture as "in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death," published op-eds at Time and the New York Daily News . And on Sunday, Yoo appeared on CNN to defend the indefensible.

By now, it should come as no surprise that the hyper-partisan Yoo suggested that the Senate Intelligence Committee's documentation of grotesque interrogation practices was probably fabricated. But what is shocking is that John Yoo is troubled by the illegality of sadistic tactics like "forced rectal feeding." After all, back in 2005 the architect of George W. Bush's detainee torture declared the President had the authority to interrogate a terror suspect by "crushing the testicles of the person's child."

When CNN host Fareed Zakaria asked him about CIA techniques like "forced rectal feeding", "threatening to rape the mothers of prisoners" and "people with broken limbs being forced to stand for hours and hours," Attorney Yoo said that would be against the rules (if it in fact it happened):



"Those are very troubling examples. They would not have been approved by the Justice Department. They were not approved by the Justice Department at the time...They were not supposed to be done and those people who did those are at risk legally because they were acting outside their orders."

"If the president deems that he's got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person's child, there is no law that can stop him?"

But during a December 2005 symposium in Chicago, Yoo argued that under his theory of the "unitary executive" and virtually unlimited presidential power as Commander-in-Chief, President Bush could legally order those tortures and much worse. Yoo was asked:Continue reading below about John Yoo's balls below: