A lot of criticism has been levelled at President Barack Obama for his refusal to entertain the notion of prosecuting the individuals responsible for allowing torture (often in the form of waterboarding) to be used as an interrogation technique for detainees in American prisons. Mr. Obama's defence of the CIA and various officials under the Bush administration is political, pragmatic, and to an extent legal in nature. However, not enough criticism has been directed at John Yoo (pictured above). A professor of Law at the Berkeley School of Law, John Yoo was a pivotal figure in the Bush administration's drive to legalise torture. Mr. Yoo co-authored the Bybee Memo (downloadable here), a document issued by the Bush administration's Department of Justice in response to CIA enquiries regarding the legality of certain interrogation methods.
Among other things, Mr. Yoo concludes in the memo that even though an act is "cruel, inhuman or degrading", it may yet not exceed the prerogative of the state to authorise it, and thus does not subject any interrogator to legal prosecution. Essentially, the CIA asked if it could torture suspects, and Mr. Yoo is the one who answered "yes".
Mr. Yoo had a chance to defend his position in a debate with Doug Cassel, a human rights scholar, at Notre Dame University. I've reprinted an excerpt:
Cassel: If the president deems he's got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person's child, there is no law that can stop him?Yoo: No treaty.Cassel: Also no law by Congress; that is what you wrote in the August 2002 memo-Yoo: I think it depends on why the president thinks he needs to do that.
Mr. Yoo's position is a bald reminder of the vast gulf that exists between what is legal and what is just. There is an argument to be made that what interrogations conducted under the Bush administration were perfectly legal, enshrined as they were in a liberal and disingenuous reading of the law. They were nonetheless despicably criminal.
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2 comments:
1) An act cannot be criminal unless it is illegal - it may be unjust, or wicked, but a crime, by definition, is an illicit act.
2) Yoo is somewhat disingenuous when he suggests that "no treaty" prohibits torture of enemy combatants. It is accepted that enemy combatants have fewer rights than regular soldiers in international law, but they cannot be tortured at will.
3) Yoo is not a policymaker. He is an academic who has been influential in the political circles of the past administration. This does not exonerate your favourite Magic 'Gro, but merely suggests that he, too, despite his soulful, fuzzy rhetoric is incapable of making the US any more of a civilised nation than the previous Chimp-in-Chief, Jorge Booosh.
I love that your brother is now posting comments.
Umm not overly related to the article but I gotta agree with Obama's decision not to prosecute those that were responsible for allowing torture in the last administration.
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