In the spring of 2002, members of the Bush administration came to John Yoo, then a deputy Assistant Attorney General at the Justice Department, to help the administration decide where the legal limit was between interrogation and torture.
Yoo wrote what came to be known as 'the torture memos' the Bush administration used to delineate the limits of allowable interrogation techniques in wartime. Yoo, now a law professor at University of California at Berkeley, has written a new book that examines the history of executive power, called “Crisis and Command: A History of Executive Power from George Washington to George W. Bush
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The show is a co-production of WNYC Radio and Public Radio International, in collaboration with New York Times Radio and WGBH Boston.
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Comments [2]
Come on, Hockenberry! I can't believe you let Yoo's self-serving comment that 9/11 put us in a situation "without precedent" go by without question.
Obviously the Geneva Convention, the Convention Against Torture, the US-led prosecution of Japanese officers who ordered waterboarding against American servicemen in WWII would be a good starting point.
It is lazy, lapdog press interviews such as this that allow people like John Yoo to subvert civic debate with self-serving misnformation. If this is the reception political figures can expect from the media, its wonder all eyes were on John Stuart - our last hope - the other night.
I am disappointed in WNYC, whose standard is usually very high. Put Yoo on with Brian Lehrer and I bet we would see a much better result!
Are you serious with that interview with John Yoo?!
I mean he said that the legality of the use of torture is a "gray area"- has he (or you for that matter) never heard of the Geneva Conventions?!
Never mind that he basically used our constitutional protections as toilet paper in what he wrote. Come on! you never even tried to challenge him. Many smarter people than I consider this guy a war criminal and you just sat there and chatted and laughed with him. Telling him that he was good at avoiding answering questions.
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