indepublica

Writing a book apparently. Enjoy some of his signature legal thinking in this multi-part, book-pushing Daily Show interview. Perhaps the most interesting detail: Yoo has never actually met W.: Part 1, Part2, and Part 3. Here’s an excerpt:

Stewart: In the brief, everything that you came up with went in the direction of us being able to do more things, the president having more power. And it strikes me as odd, because the lawyers that I’ve traditionally dealt with try and give you arguments for and against, and it strikes me as, maybe not unique to the Bush administration, but all the arguments for them come as justifications for what they want to do…

Yoo: Well first thing, let me say there were just no legal precedents, or practices ever before. This question had never come up before…

Stewart: That’s not true.

Yoo: I couldn’t go and say, look here are the things that had been decided by courts before about this question…

Stewart: Wait, wait, wait, let me step in very quickly. We signed a treaty banning torture. So the question had come up, and we had answered it by saying, yeah we’re not going to do that.

Yoo: No, the question is what does the treaty mean. Right, so it wasn’t that…

Stewart: You’re saying that when we signed the treaty, it had not come up what it meant. We just signed it.

Yoo: Right, we had signed it and passed a statute.

…

Stewart: You’re suggesting that we had never addressed what torture was.

Yoo: No, we had not addressed what is interrogation…

Stewart: We prosecuted people for torture in war, yeah?

Yoo: I’m saying we had not faced the question of what interrogation methods do not constitute torture, but go beyond the regular law enforcement methods that we’ve used in the past.

Stewart: Well, how did we then conduct trials for people that had tortured Americans?

Yoo: Because all those cases were ones where what those other governments had done to our soldiers were well beyond the line of what anyone would think are torture…

Want something a little more to the point? Try this recent interview on NPR where Yoo refutes critical logic by ‘sharing concerns.’ A telling (and compressed) exerpt (emphasis added):

John Yoo: We need a powerful president because we have periods of emergency, crisis and even war where we need part of the government that can act quickly in response, that the powerful president isn’t necessary all the time. It’s someone who we need to come forward and address unforeseen events and circumstances.

Madeleine Brand: You argue in the book that the greatest presidents come forward during times of crisis to do that, to seize power when they can, and to expand the role of the executive.

Yoo: That’s right… They embraced their power. They used their powers vigorously to attack the challenges of their day and often – or sometimes in direct conflict with the Congress and the Supreme Court.

Brand: But when we were looking at what is commonly called the war on terrorism, it’s often seen as an unending war. And so, how do these powers get put back in the bottle if you have an unending war?

Yoo: I share your concerns. And the hard thing is how do we figure out when the war against al-Qaida… is going to be over… How do we know when the war is over? I think that’s a very fair and difficult question because it’s that point when the president’s powers will recede.