Finally reading the infamous Yoo memos after all these years was a sort of vertiginous experience, like catching sight of a unicorn, or meeting Santa Claus, or having brunch with Stalin.  I realized that there was a part of me that was actually hoping to discover some ingenious argument in defense of warrantless surveillance, some devlishly clever bit of legal ledgerdemain that nobody had anticipated.  In other words, something better than the same bollocks we’ve been seeing in the Weekly Standard and the Wall Street Journal op-ed page for three years. Sadly, no. It’s all too evident now why they thought it was vital to keep these memoranda secret all this time. You can read my writeup at Ars Technica.