On the other side of the country, John Yoo works as a professor at the University of California at Berkeley's School of Law. You may remember John Yoo from the eponymous memo he wrote while working at the Department of Justice in which he used legalesque reasoning to justify torture. He argued that statutory bans on torture didn't apply to Bush because his plenary power as president to execute the Global War on Terrorism means that he doesn't have to follow the law anymore. Or, as Yoo put it, Congress "can't prevent the President from ordering torture."

The Obama administration has promised that no one would be prosecuted for participating in Bush administration war crimes. Even though there was plenty of sound legal advice at the time telling the White House that they had absolutely no right to torture people, and even though there is plenty of professional advice stating that torture does nothing to keep people safe since it usually provide false information and it destroys American human rights credibility and mobilizes all sorts of people against us, we don't want to look to the past, but to the future.

And what if we do prosecute these people? Will agents of the US government be less likely to torture in the future? The last thing we'd want is for them not to use whatever tactics they need to send the message that America is the meanest bully on the block the next time the US gets attacked.

Won't somebody please think of the children?

We've known for a long time that the US has a different criminal justice system for people who have power. We send more people to prison than any other country in the world, even for our population. We're so afraid of appearing soft on crime that we send more nonviolent offenders to prison than any other country for its population as well. You have to send a strong message or you're soft on crime.

But when it comes to torture, we're letting these people off the hook because they're powerful and considered very serious and respectable people. If they weren't so powerful, though, they'd be left to fend for themselves in the same criminal justice system that the rest of America has to deal with.

I'm not saying that there isn't anything creepy about people having sex in a park. But that isn't a reason to waste these resources to have stings just to make sure we prosecute them. And there is a way to have parks open to public sex so that people with children know not to go there (not that accidentally seeing a man go into the woods to have sex is going to send a child to an asylum for the rest of their life).

But if we are going to make sure that these people are punished for breaking the law, there's no reason war criminal John Yoo should be sitting in Berkeley with a very respectable (and assuredly well-paid) job teaching the next generation of lawyers how to analyze American law. He gave legal advice that was obviously written just to give his clients the cover they wanted so that they could go out and break the law.

Perhaps it's the Dirty Fucking Hippie in me speaking, or maybe the Radical Homosexual Activist, but a few boys in the woods giving blow jobs is nothing compared to locking a person in a coffin with insects or permanently destroying a person's mind with sleep and sensory deprivation and solitary confinement. One demonstrates a complete lack of moral compass and sociopathic tendencies, the other is merely a desire to have sex that has no other outlet.

If John Yoo doesn't do anything stupid like go to a country that's willing to extradite him to Spain to be tried for his lead role in war crimes, he'll likely get off the hook. The other men in Oklahoma, whose faces and names were published in the local paper to show everyone who the perverts are that live among them, aren't so lucky.

I'm sure the former Justice Department lawyers are just praying no one finds out about an illicit affair that occurred while they were choreographing torture, because that's probably the only thing that would lead to investigations.

(Just to clarify, the picture before the jump is of John Yoo, not someone arrested for public sex in Oklahoma.)