Posted by Tina
I dont usually read Esquire magazine(too busy looking at the pictures)……………JUUUST KID-DING!
I think some of you might enjoy reading this interview with the man who took part in deciding where the lines should be drawn on the issue of interrogation and captured terrorists. Find it in Esquire by following the link below:
John Yoo: In His Own Words, by John H. Richardson – Esquire
John Yoo is a professor of constitutional law at the University of California-Berkeley. He is also the main author of what has come to be known as “The Torture Memo,” the long-sealed internal White House document that defined precisely which aggressive techniques could be legally employed by CIA interrogators against suspected terrorists. ** Earlier this year, Yoo sat down with Esquire author John H. Richardson for a series of lengthy interviews about the memo and about how Yoo — a scholar by trade, a libertarian by temperament — came to be the man behind it.
There is an oppositional tone or approach to what Im writing. Certainly in the war powers Im writing against what most professors think. I wont say its pleasurable to be like that. But I do find interesting intellectual questions are overlooked if theres a sort of widely held consensus that causes you not to think about things carefully. But I would probably be very bored writing papers that said, Yes, Congress has the power to declare war and they should decide. Just to ratify the conventional wisdom is not interesting to me. I do in my academic work try to think of things that are unusual, that someone hasnt said before. But its not pleasurable by any means. To be a conservative in academia you have to be ready to take a certain amount of crap. Not a certain amount. A lot of crap. ** I dont have any problems with Congress funding cutoffs, passing the MCA, not confirming generals, holding oversight hearings, all the things they do. But I think it wasnt intended at the beginning, if you lose then just go to the court and sue the government to say the Iraq War is unconstitutional, or sue the telecom companies. I think that — obviously, whenever you do judicial review, it blocks what the majority wants — but I dont think, based on my reading, that the court system was intended to mediate disputes between the two branches about war. ** The stuff I worked on was the legal stuff. So I never went to a meeting or even remember discussing with anyone about the merits. I thought the president could use force in Iraq. It was definitely constitutional once Congress passed a law authorizing the president to use force in Iraq. ** Yeah, I did think it was a war. Some of the things I thought about were the level of violence. The source. Three thousand people killed by a foreign enemy that had a purpose that was to affect our foreign policy. It wasnt like crime in the sense that crime is sporadic. Its not really carried out with the purpose to change a policy. Its usually carried out for financial gain. Its persistent and permanent. This was organized use of violence by someone else to change our policies. So thats the way I thought it through. ** Zawahiri and bin Laden are the political leadership. The operational leader is the guy we captured. And he is the guy who wrote their manual on resistance to interrogation. So any normal thing we try he would recognize and counter. So you have a choice, if you want to use interrogation methods that are coercive that you dont think are going to cause any long-term permanent harm. Are you willing to forego those? I have a hard time believing an American president would say, No, absolutely not.