Yoo’s answer: “No treaty,” and depending on the president’s belief at the time, no law.

It is similar legal opinions that have made John Yoo one of the most vilified lawyers in America. Yoo’s resumé from his tenure in the White House Office of Legal Counsel reads like a list of bullet points of the most widely criticized policies of Bush’s presidency. It was Yoo who provided the legal backbone to strip enemy combatants of Geneva Convention protections. It was Yoo who validated Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program. It was Yoo who argued that the president was not subject to the War Crimes Act. And most notably, it was Yoo who authored a slew of memos deeming waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques legal.

For his actions, Yoo has been pilloried by the left as a sadistic tyrant who eviscerated the Constitution. The U.S. Justice Department has recommended his disbarment. He has been sued by the mother of U.S. detainee Jose Padilla, and officials in both Spain and Germany have brought war crimes charges against him.

Will Bunch Teaches John Yoo a Lesson About Appropriate Public Discourse

For these reasons, one might think Yoo’s prospects for future employment were dim. However, his past didn’t stop the Philadelphia Inquirer – Yoo’s hometown newspaper – from hiring the controversial lawyer to write a monthly column. Yoo’s writings, published under the headline “Closing Arguments,” are primarily about law. His most recent column argued against President Obama’s assertion that he will appoint a new Supreme Court justice who uses empathy in the courtroom.

Before serving in the Bush administration, Yoo served as a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley. His vast legal scholarship focused on U.S. foreign relations, international law and the Constitution’s separation of powers. He also wrote two books on foreign affairs and the War on Terror. Yoo even had a short stint as journalist; he spent a summer interning at The Wall Street Journal between college and law school. But for Will Bunch, a writer for The Philadelphia Daily News, Yoo’s credentials don’t make the cut for columnist material.

In a scathing blog post, Bunch harshly criticized the decision to hire Yoo. “As an American citizen, I am still reeling from the knowledge that our government tortured people in my name,” Bunch said. “As a journalist, the fact that my byline and John Yoo’s are now rolling off the same printing press is adding insult to injury.”

As a journalist and an American citizen, I couldn’t disagree more. The Philadelphia Inquirer has voiced an editorial opinion against harsh interrogation techniques; the fact that it would hire a law scholar who holds the opposite viewpoint is a testament to its commitment to promoting a marketplace of ideas. Too often, newspapers abandon rigorous discourse on the opinion page for an echo chamber of rants. Harold Jackson, the opinion editor of the Inquirer, said the paper has been adding more conservative columnists to provide ideological balance. “It means we aren’t afraid to let people hear what the other side has to say,” Jackson said. “We think most of our readers aren’t afraid, either.”

I wish Jackson was correct, but unfortunately many Americans don’t want discourse that challenges their belief structure. They’d rather write Yoo off as a sadistic yahoo and argue for his removal from the Inquirer than actually hear the basis for his political philosophy.

Bunch argues that the inclusion of Yoo in the Inquirer’s editorial page is another example of what he calls “on one hand, on the other hand journalism,” a practice in which newspapers provide equal time and authority to ideas regardless of their merits. This observation makes the grossly inaccurate assumption that Bunch or the staff of the Inquirer are the only ones qualified to pass judgment on the complexity of Yoo’s legal memos – they aren’t. However, Yoo is eminently qualified to provide a conservative interpretation of executive power and international law.

To suggest that editors at the Philadelphia Inquirer should make a moral judgment to prohibit discussions about legal issues and accordingly exclude Yoo’s voice for the paper is absurd. And to drape what is clearly an attempt in political censorship under the guise of patriotism is not only disingenuous, but a complete bastardization of what a free press is intended to provide.

Let me make this crystal clear: I don’t agree with what John Yoo has to say, but I find his opinions nowhere near as detestable as those who seek to muzzle him because he doesn’t fulfill their standard of appropriate speech. To remove Yoo would sully the history of debate that has made newspapers such a vibrant and important part of American culture. As someone who believes in the promise of journalism, I simply cannot tolerate that.

This column was printed in the Oregon Daily Emerald on May 18.  Props to Patrick Finney for the illustration.

Related Post:  John Yoo is Not a Nice Guy, Especially When He’s Filling Your Coffin With Insects

I thought that the weather and the delicious meal would offset the gory details of the interrogation memos, and to some extent they did, but there is a chilling eeriness in actually reading the “dispassionate prose”–as the NYT so aptly phrased it–of the legal masterminds who set the gears of the Bush interrogation programs in motion.

Bush's Torture Dream Team

Though it was Jay S. Bybee who oversaw the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel when many of the memos authorizing brutal interrogations were approved, much of the handiwork was done by John Yoo.

Yoo–A South Korean immigrant and Yale Law graduate–set the standard for torture by defining it as action that “must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function or even death.”

Using this broad definition, he was able to authorize a slew of deplorable tactics, but the most stunning revelation wasn’t the sort of brutal torture methods the U.S. was using–as this was already well known–but the calculated, rational legal minds who so cavalierly validated it.

Yoo was a dream legal counsel for a president attempting to enhance his power, as he was totally divested from the human cost of his work. During  a 2005 debate, Yoo was asked by Notre Dame legal scholar Doug Cassel, “If the president deems that he’s got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person’s child, there is no law that can stop him?”

His  answer: “No treaty,” and, depending on the president’s belief at the time, no law either.

For this reason, it should come as no surprise that when Yoo and his cohorts were asked to supply the legal backing to exploit detainee Abu Zubaydah’s fear of insects by telling him they were putting stinging insects in his box and actually placing harmless bugs, they were game.

The bugs were never used, but the authorization was given.  It’s a strange thing to read, regardless of the sunshine.  Props to Obama for releasing the memos, even though they hampered my lunch.  Props to John Yoo for his hard work and creativity; too bad he used it in such a reprehensible way.