The recently released inspectors general report on Bush's warrantless surveillance programs had almost nothing positive to say about them or John Yoo, who provided specious legal justifications for those programs on demand. Today Yoo lashes back at the inspectors in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. His matrix of illogic is so dense that the piece appears to be intended to make your eyes bleed. In the interest of public welfare, I'll supply a summary:

Shorter John Yoo: I don't understand the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978. And neither do you.

There are so many deplorable gaps and misstatements (as with his many Bush-era OLC opinions) that the question naturally arises: Can John Yoo read?

Yoo doesn't understand the clear meaning of the FISA law or how it was updated since 1978.

Yoo isn't aware that the FISA law came into existence in 1978, long after Franklin Roosevelt's death.

Yoo makes a constitutional argument without displaying any apparent awareness of the text of the Constitution.

Yoo doesn't understand what was at issue in Youngstown v. Sawyer, with its landmark ruling by the Supreme Court on the balance between Congressional and Presidential power.

Yoo quotes from but evidently hasn't read the Federalist Papers.

Yoo hasn't even read what he himself wrote about the Patriot Act in 2003.

Traditionally it has been John Yoo's writings that have evoked horror and disgust. But the deeper problem appears to be Yoo's reading ability.

• John-Yoo
• warrantless-wiretapping
• FISA
• literacy,
• civil-liberties.