Esquire’s John Richardson profiled Cal professor John Yoo in this month’s issue (the one with Obama on the cover). Called “Is John Yoo a Monster?” the profile is an interesting one. It attempts to humanize Yoo — and after all the bashing he’s taken since the release of the Yoo torture memo, it’s easy to understand why Richardson would be tempted to show that the guy has some heart. And after reading the profile, you could almost believe it.
Except when you read this near the end:
Yoo doesn’t say anything for a moment, then answers in his usual measured tone. “In World War II, we interned people, tens of thousands of citizens. We tried citizens who were enemy spies under military commissions which had no procedures at all. We let the Air Force kill hundreds of thousands of civilians in firebombing runs in Europe. We dropped a nuclear weapon on Japan. Waterboarding we think is torture, but it happened to three people. The scale of magnitude is different.”“But if the war goes on forever, we’ve created a torture state.”
“We’ve done it three times,” he repeats.
“The White House launched an elective war against a country based on false premises.”
“They made a mistake.”
“But your theory puts the power in the hands of a person who then can invade the wrong country.”
“Who can make a mistake. The Constitution can’t protect against bad decisions,” he insists. “What the framers were really worried about was not that the president would make a mistake, but that the president would become a dictator, and I really don’t think Bush has become that.”
Now, even if you gave Yoo the benefit of the doubt that he didn’t believe that Bush and Cheney wouldn’t abuse every inch of power they were given, and even if you believe that lauching the war in Iraq is a “mistake,” does “we’ve done it three times” justify anything? What happened to learning from your mistakes? It’s incredibly naive at best, and dangerously stupid at worst.
And I wish Richardson would have pressed him on the issue of the fact that it’s been proven, time and again, that torture doesn’t work. So in the end, Yoo could write legal memos justifying torture until the cows come home. When it comes down to it, Yoo didn’t have the balls to say no to Bush and Cheney. Jack Goldsmith did. Daniel Levin did. So when it all the justifications are exhausted, the question still stands: Why couldn’t Yoo?
