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Andrew Sullivan notices this bit of self-justification from JohnYoo:

Would we have wanted President Abraham Lincoln to worry about his personal liability for issuing the Emancipation Proclamation freeing the slaves (done on his sole authority as commander-in-chief)?

But James Ross took care of that comparison awhile back:

Lincoln did not want to recognize the rebellion of the southern states as legitimate, nor was it desirable or feasible to label all Johnny Rebs as traitors subject to execution. He needed a way to treat captured Confederate soldiers as prisoners of war without suggesting that the Confederate States of America was a lawful state.

Sound familiar? There's more. Lincoln turned to a lawyer, Francis Lieber, to help him decide his course.

Contrary to prevailing attitudes in the North, Lieber urged that Union forces on humanitarian grounds provide the privileges of belligerency to Confederate forces. This allowed Lincoln to dodge the thorny question of appearing to recognize the Confederacy while providing rebel soldiers the protections then normally due prisoners-of-war.

Doesn't sound quite as familiar, does it?

Yoo doesn't want Jose Padilla's lawsuit against him -- for helping authorize the confinement and "extreme interrogation" of Padilla, a U.S. citizen --to be a template for thwarted terrorists using "lawfare" to tie the country's legal system in knots.

But that's unlikely: U.S. district courts are swamped with frivolous lawsuits from federal prisoners all the time -- and yes, they're a pain in the butt. But cases without merit are disposed of quickly and quietly, and there's been no need to take away the right to sue for ill treatment. Yoo's argument is a red herring.