John Yoo in…Esquire?
There’s a very interesting profile of John Yoo in this month’s Esquire, which arrived in my mailbox yesterday. (Yes I subscribe. And I love it.) The story isn’t online yet, but there’s an excerpt from Yoo and the author’s interview on the web. The profile is, surprisingly, extremely sympathetic. If Glenn Greenwald reads it, after clamoring for all this time for mainstream media attention on John Yoo, he will probably blow his top. Shockingly, it turns out that Yoo is…A LAWYER!! And he used legal frameworks (Supreme Court precedents, laws on the books, treaties and conventions, etc.) to formulate the controversial “torture memo.”
An excerpt:
“I really tried to distinguish between law and policy,” he insists. Despite Yoo’s shocking language defining severe pain as “equivalent to” organ failure or death, he points out that the memo clearly defines as torture mock executions, threats of imminent death, and beatings. He also says it’s unfair for people to confuse the war crimes of Abu Ghraib with the aggressive interrogations he authorized. His memo also includes a long list of examples of acts that various courts have found to be torture, page after page of severe beatings and electric shocks and even one case where guards shackled a man to a bed, placed a towel over his face, and poured water down his nose–a nearly exact description of waterboarding, “which people ignore because they focus on that one sentence,” Yoo says. “So if you read the whole opinion, I don’t think of it as a license to do anything you want to.”
It’s true, the list is there, the cautionary intent is clear. I’ve never seen it mentioned by any of his critics.
I’m surprised Esquire didn’t get cute and title the piece “The Banality of Lawyering,” or some such. It’s a remarkably even-handed profile featuring interviews with his critics (including Jose Padilla’s lawyer, who is suing Yoo for violating his client’s civil rights) and detailing Yoo’s background (his parents are an amazing immigrant success story). Give it a read when it hits the web.* You won’t be disappointed. (Unless you are, as I mentioned, Glenn Greenwald…or someone like him, who merely wants blood for what they see as grave crimes against humanity.)
*Or go buy a copy. In addition to the Yoo profile there’s also the “Esquire Guide to Denim.” Among other things, you’ll learn the difference between $50, $98, $210, and $440 jeans. Like I said, I love this magazine.