John Yoo: August 2008 Archives

"The one thing that is missing is an understanding of the lawyers on the other side: the darker figures of the story. Lawyers like Prof. John Yoo (who is given passing reference in the book) and Prof. Viet D. Dinh are viewed by many law professors and civil libertarians as grotesque and even monstrous in their work to excuse torture and to deny the basic rights of detainees. They remain cutout caricatures in books examining the tribunals."

from How a Jihadist Curtailed a President's Authority
by Jonathon Turley

...death is worse than torture, but everyone except pacifists thinks there are circumstances in which war is justified. War means killing people. If we are entitled to kill people, we must be entitled to injure them. I don't see how it can be reasonable to have an absolute prohibition on torture when you don't have an absolute prohibition on killing. Reasonable people will disagree about when torture is justified. But that, in some circumstances, it is justified seems to me to be just moral common sense.

interview with ALASDAIR PALMER, The Spectator, published in The Gazette (Montreal) 2007  http://tinyurl.com/5bsbfw