Yoo is hawking his new book, Crisis and Command and spoke with Madeleine Brand on NPR's All Things Considered last night Interview (sorry, can't embed audio but you can hear it at link).
Here's the money quote from when she asked him to reflect on Bush's presidency:
"the Iraq War, obviously is always going to be a question. I personally have never been certain ... whether the Iraq War made sense as a matter of strategy"
Right - so we've violated the Constitution, international treaties and basic human rights in a war which may not have been 'strategic' (I can think of alternate adjectives for the war, however, but I'll sleep better tonight knowing we changed who we are as a country on such flimsy conviction and my dreams will be pondering the definition of evil).
Further signs of Yoo's ability to equivocate include his saying that it will be awhile before George Bush's term will be placed in among all of the other presidents, but he feels it will be in the middle somewhere.
Ms. Brand was persistent in trying to nail Yoo down on where he got the definition for what constitutes 'torture,' and she did get him to acknowledge that the language came from Medicare language defining 'Emergency Medical Condition:'
The term "emergency medical condition" means a medical condition manifesting itself by acute symptoms of sufficient severity (including severe pain) such that a prudent layperson, who possesses an average knowledge of health and medicine, could reasonably expect the absence of immediate medical attention to result in --
(i) placing the health of the individual (or, with respect to a pregnant woman, the health of the woman or her unborn child) in serious jeopardy,
(ii) serious impairment to bodily functions, or
(iii) serious dysfunction of any bodily organ or part.
For those who haven't yet seen them, here is Yoo on the Daily Show this month - Stewart asks him if our only two choices for interrogation were giving suspects their Miranda rights or waterboarding them - the answer is less than satisfactory, of course. Yoo made the comment about Iraq strategy to Stewart last week:
Apparently, Yoo has never met President Bush. Interesting.
If I'm understanding what Yoo is saying, it doesn't sound like he's a sadist exactly (please don't mistake me for an apologist in saying that because it doesn't inspire me to despise him any less). He appears to be against the idea of torture and really felt like it was his job to discern what didn't meet the measure of torture - somehow, for this man, there's apparently a gray area of some kind determining which things are horrendous and which are not quite horrendous enough to be illegal. Ewwwwww.
Additionally, if I understood his argument, he seems to be claiming that we MUST give the executive the leeway to commit acts this heinous because the executive MUST be able to protect the country when it is threatened. He acknowledges that in allowing this authority there will sometimes be executives who overstep, sometimes by a lot. Yoo notes that Congress has to be complicit for the executive to get away with it.
If you ask me, Yoo is speaking of a nation of men and not laws. My understanding is that the intention of our founders was to ensure a nation of laws and not men, and that creating an executive - while allowing the country to maneuver quickly when necessary - was not intended to undermine the whole government construct.
Link to full Daily Show episode.
Hat Tip to SuperBowlXX for the diary explaining how to embed Comedy Central videos...