Q and A with US Torture Memo attorney John Yoo

Torture Memo attorney John Yoo, on his former boss, George W. Bush: "No, I've never met him. I don't know Cheney either. I have not gone hunting with him, which is probably a good thing for me." NYT.

• [Xopher]

  John Yoo makes me so angry I become incoherent. I was shouting obscenities at the TV when he was on The Daily Show (btw, only about a third of the audience “welcomed” him with applause when he came on; I sure wouldn’t). Dirty, filthly, lying, criminal scumbag.

  He shouldn’t be teaching at a university. He should be making license plates in a federal maximum-security prison.

• [Deidzoeb]

  Re: Yoo admitting he never met Bush 42. I accidentally read one of Peggy Noonan’s books, “What I saw at the Revolution” I think. If I remember the details correctly, she mentions how exciting it was to meet Reagan for the first time — one year after she had started writing speeches for him. (Or it might have been the first time she talked with him for more than five or ten minutes, something like that. It seemed like it should have been an embarrassing admission.)

  • [mdh]

    It seemed like it should have been an embarrassing admission.

    alternately, it was a window into conservative shamelessness.

    • [Deidzoeb]

      mdh, thank you exactly. And that’s why the two situations seemed similar.

      • [mdh]

        and thank you for the raw materials. Glad you saw i was adding to your point… so many people here see every response as a challenge.

• [chgoliz]

  I always find it interesting to note which NYT pieces have the comments section dis-enabled. Sometimes it will be only one specific piece for a regular columnist who normally has active comment threads…they know which pieces will create the most outrage and cut things off before they can even start. The comments for this piece would definitely get out of hand quickly.

  Let’s see…there’s the notion that conservatives can’t get jobs in academia, so he had to settle for working at one of the best universities in the country, poor baby. Or the off-hand comment that sometimes you just have to make an on-the-spot decision between following the needs of the president or those of Congress.

  I did love his line about Monica Lewinsky being closer to a president than he was, though.

• [mdh]

  I did love his line about Monica Lewinsky being closer to a president than he was, though.

  maybe 180 degrees closer, but their jobs were the same.

• [JimEJim]

  That interview makes him sound like a grade A douche. It’s no wonder he was able to write that memo and still defend it with no remorse.

• [Anonymous]

  I wish I could upvote mdh.

• [Brainspore]

  Sometimes I wonder if U.C. Berkeley hired Yoo just so they could have a heartless, torture-enabling neocon to point to whenever someone accuses the University of being too liberal.

• [Thalia]

  I’m not surprised at Yoo’s refusal to give a hoot about others. After all, he was never interested in what his own parents did. Weird man.

  But I find this particularly sad: Do you regret writing the so-called torture memos, which claimed that President Bush was legally entitled to ignore laws prohibiting torture?
  No, I had to write them. It was my job. As a lawyer, I had a client. The client needed a legal question answered.

  When I have a client with a legal question, I do my best to arrive at a correct answer. Which may not necessarily be the answer the client wants, but which is consistent with the laws of the land. Funny that Professor Yoo doesn’t realize that his job was do do correct analysis.

• [Anonymous]

  The most interesting part is Yoo’s discussion of Carter’s “malaise” speech. I don’t quite get it though; it’s a fact that Carter never used the word “malaise” in his speech, and Yoo thought he meant mayonnaise?

• [MrJM]

  The image of John Yoo taking a shotgun blast to the face is a great way to kick-off the New Year.

  • [querent]

    seconded.

  • [phisrow]

    I think you mean “undergoing an enhanced hunting trip”.