April 2, 2008: Former Justice Department Official Defends Torture Memo

John Yoo, the author of the just-released 2003 torture memo that advocated virtually unlimited presidential powers and asserted that US military can torture terrorist suspects (see March 14, 2003 and April 1, 2008), says that the memo is anything but extraordinary, and accuses his Justice Department successors of giving in to political pressures. Yoo is a former Justice Department official who now teaches law at the University of California at Berkeley. Yoo says the Justice Department altered its opinions “for appearances’ sake,” and his successors “ignored the Department’s long tradition in defending the president’s authority in wartime.” The memo did not “invent… some novel interpretation of the Constitution… our legal advice to the president, in fact, was near boilerplate.” [Washington Post, 4/2/2008] Yoo says that memos such as his sacrificed sensibility for exactitude, and asserts that he felt it necessary to be as detailed and specific as possible. “You have to draw the line. What the government is doing is unpleasant. It’s the use of violence. I don’t disagree with that. But I also think part of the job unfortunately of being a lawyer sometimes is you have to draw those lines. I think I could have written it in a much more—we could have written it in a much more palatable way, but it would have been vague.” [Washington Post, 4/6/2008] Others do not agree with Yoo’s defense (see April 2-4, 2008).