John Yoo

John Yoo Calls on Obama Administration to Restore Senate’s Treaty Power

The New York Times, January 4, 2009 by John R. Bolton and John Yoo
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/05/opinion/05bolton.html

International agreements that go beyond the rules of international trade and finance—that involve significant national-security commitments, or that purport to delegate lawmaking and enforcement functions to international organizations, or that could fundamentally alter the American constitutional system of individual rights—should receive the intense scrutiny of the treaty process, regardless of their policy merits.

John Yoo Questions Calls to Close Guantanamo

FOX TV, America’s News Headquarters, Dec. 10, 2008 Hosted by Heather Nauert
(Link no longer active)

“It’s very easy to say, ‘Oh, we should shut down Guantanamo Bay, it’s hurting our world image.’ The hard thing is, what do you do when you shut it down?… Where in the United States are we going to house 250 of the worst terrorists, people so bad that we could not convince their own countries to take them back; people who are so bad that … they don’t really care about having a fair trial. They just want to go along and get themselves executed to become martyrs.”

John Yoo Says Election Was No Sweeping Mandate

Philadelphia Inquirer, Dec. 7, 2008 by John Yoo
http://www.aei.org/publications/filter.all%2CpubID.29030/pub_detail.asp

Obama shouldn’t misinterpret his electoral victory as a sweeping mandate—perhaps President Bush’s overarching political mistake—or the introduction of a new political order. The president-elect would be better-served by moving swiftly to cure the recession and then focusing on moderate, bipartisan policies in areas such as education, spending and entitlement reform.

John Yoo Warns of Supreme Court’s Expanding Power

The Philadelphia Inquirer, August 10, by John Yoo
http://www.philly.com/inquirer/currents/26482104.html

Slowly but surely, the justices have expanded their power to make many of our society’s fundamental political and moral decisions…. This is not to deny that there are moments that we need the courts to defend individual liberties against unconstitutional actions by the government. But those moments may not be as ever-present as the federal courts today may think, and the price is not just that the courts may get it wrong, but that the expansion of their powers will sap our energies of republican self-government.

John Yoo Criticizes Supreme Court’s Guantanamo Ruling

The New York Times, July 4, by William Glaberson
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/04/washington/04gitmo.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print&adxnnlx=1215561648-rE/5KhbxUkOh2WYH9KxoHQ

John Yoo, one of the architects of the administration’s original detention policy … said federal courts usually waited for a trial to play out before evaluating its fairness. But, he said, after the “overreaching” by the Supreme Court decision, “any form of judicial micromanagement is possible.”

John Yoo Defends Policy of Harsh Interrogations

Esquire, May 13, by John H. Richardson
http://www.esquire.com/features/john-yoo-0608

But those harsh interrogation techniques migrated straight to Iraq. What about that? “That was definitely not permitted under the decision-making level I was at,” Yoo says. “It was clearly not. The Geneva Conventions fully applied in Iraq…. In World War II, we interned people, tens of thousands of citizens. We tried citizens who were enemy spies under military commissions which had no procedures at all…. We dropped a nuclear weapon on Japan. Waterboarding we think is torture, but it happened to three people. The scale of magnitude is different.”