The sounds of one hand clapping for the value of the EGO; as told by a sycophant in federal office.
It is useless to comment that here is the picture of PURE EVIL, but there ya go; that' s precisely what it is.
The worst part for me is when Yoo tells the interviewer (CIA lackey ??? ) that they aren't going to the park as "it's boring. Just a bunch of homeless people".
No, John, do not take a look at your handiwork - those homeless veterans forced to live in there. Don't think about their families. Show no remorse to those you have damaged, just do that spin and be part of the circular firing squad !! It's all of course, Ashcroft's and Gonezales' fault" Right? WRONG.
As a woman I have to say it: how could ANYONE in their right mind sleep with this man?
Deconstructing this mythology would take hours of my time. I'm not going to do that, but I wanted to make sure that the actual URL got posted. This article in and of itself is NOT free speech; it's a crime against humanity. This is thinly disguised HATE SPEECH.
And to watch this ritzo buy Lincoln cheaply makes me SICK to my stomache. Oh, lucky us! How will John Yoo warp those thoughts while he sits in PRISON ??
The FASCISTS lawyer. How friggin impressive. (Me, I prefer the high caliber lawyers of We the - all of the - People .. ) My fervant prayer is that they drown him out at the Berkley commencement .. and that he faces charges in Very Short Order.
Now, dear reader, please go and write
a letter to the ICC.
The ICC has established its headquarters in The Hague, The Netherlands. The Court is currently located at ‘de arc’.
Address: Maanweg 174, 2516 AB, The Hague, Netherlands.
Postal Address: Po Box 19519, 2500 CM, Den Haag, Netherlands.
It's time us ACTIVISTS have a winning day.
This blog is going to add a WAR CRIMES
section now.
It's that time ..
John Yoo: In His Own Words
By John H. Richardson
http://www.esquire.com/the-side/feature/john-yoo
MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images
John Yoo served as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Legal Counsel in the U.S. Justice Department from 2001 to 2003, where he was involved in many of the legal issues concerning the war on terrorism.
John Yoo is a professor of constitutional law at the University of California-Berkeley. He is also the main author of what has come to be known as "The Torture Memo," the long-sealed internal White House document that defined precisely which aggressive techniques could be legally employed by CIA interrogators against suspected terrorists.
Earlier this year, Yoo sat down with Esquire author John H. Richardson for a series of lengthy interviews about the memo and about how Yoo -- a scholar by trade, a libertarian by temperament -- came to be the man behind it. Some of his words appeared in Richardson's June 2008 profile, "Is This Man a Monster?" Here we present his words in their entirety.
A note on the format: Because Richardson did not record many of his questions, they have been left out of this document. For the most part, we believe, this does not detract from the clarity or intent of Yoo's responses. Where this is not the case, we have added clarifying statements in brackets.
***
I was born in Korea, emigrated at 3 months, and lived in southern New Jersey and Philadelphia. I went to Episcopal Academy in Philadelphia for middle school and high school. It was founded the same year as the Constitution was written, 1789. I wore a little suit and learned Latin and Greek. Then I went to Harvard.
My folks were doctors. They wanted economic opportunity -- Korea in the 1960s was still mostly an agricultural economy. They didn’t want to live under a military dictatorship. They wanted to live in a democracy. But I don’t know if they were politically active. Once they were here they weren’t politically active. I don’t think either of them has ever given money to a political campaign. They vote -- they’re very proud, as lots of immigrants are, to vote -- but they’re not particularly Democrat or Republican.
I played soccer, tennis. By no means was I a jock. In terms of activities, at the school I went to sports are mandatory. I worked on the school paper. I did lots of stuff. Played chess, did tutoring. Didn’t do school government at all. And our school didn’t have political organizations, as far as I know -- we didn’t have a Republican or Democrats club.
I followed politics. I can remember Nixon resigning. I can remember the Vietnam War ending. I think I became politically aware under Carter and Reagan. I wasn’t one of these kids that worked on political campaigns.
I was very conscious of Reagan. I very much agreed with the policies he ran on. Being Korean, I think it was natural to support the candidate that was most anti-communist. But I also thought -- I wasn’t a property owner or making income or anything, but the message of lower taxes and smaller government made sense to me.
Certainly my parents were anti-communists. They were refugees during the Korean War, they saw terrible things that North Korea did. The North went all the way down, everybody really suffered and blamed it on North Korea, which I think is reasonable. So they were very anti-communist because of that.
Otherwise they were fairly libertarian, which is not uncommon for immigrants either. They don’t want government interfering very much in the decisions they make and the choices they make in life. Certainly I think Korea is much more of an authoritarian country, and you come to the United States because it offers you a personal freedom that is not so common abroad. I never sat down with them and talked extensively about it, I just get that sense.
I have a younger brother who has a Ph.D. in biology. Now he’s in the biotechnology industry. He’s two years younger than me.
Harvard. American history.
I don’t know, I was just interested in it. Harvard doesn’t give you a lot of guidance and the school I went to had a lot of emphasis on history. I took Latin and Greek, I was interested in classics.
I did very well in high school, obviously, to get into Harvard. I was at the top of the class. It was the only way you could get into Harvard.
The things I did in college were mostly about foreign policy. My area was diplomatic history, the history of U.S. foreign relations. So I took a lot of courses in that area and wrote my thesis on U.S.-European relations in the 1950s and 1960s. My thesis advisors were in that area, too.
It’s not a very popular area in history these days. It used to be a big deal. If you think, in pre-1960s it was diplomatic and political history and now it’s social and cultural history. Part of it was probably, again, being from Korea, sort of interested in -- the United States came to Korea and stopped an invasion. It was a generous act on the part of the country. Objectively, if it weren’t for the United States, the whole peninsula would be communist right now and living under the most appalling conditions.
At Harvard, I joined the school paper, the Harvard Crimson. Started writing for the editorial page. I guess I wouldn’t have thought of myself as conservative as opposed to just being Republican. I guess Harvard is such a liberal place that just being Republican set me apart. I guess that’s how you could say I became politically active, writing op-eds about the events of the day and taking a conservative approach to them. But I would never -- I didn’t come to it because I was a member of the Harvard Republicans, which I wasn’t, or through a very extensive reading of political philosophy. I didn’t read Leo Strauss when I was 12 years old. I just had very basic conservative or Republican instincts.
In college, I took political science, political philosophy, American history, had exposure to more systematic thinking on both sides of all these questions. Certainly the performance of the Democrats in the ’80s didn’t change my mind. Remember Mondale running? Dukakis running? Dukakis and Bush ran in my senior year of college, so I didn’t see anything to change my mind.
Mentors then? Thomas Schwartz, a professor at Vanderbilt in History. Brian Ballow, History in Virginia now. They were junior professors then, didn’t get tenure. I took courses from them about American foreign relations, American government, politics from 1900 on. They were very rigorous. A lot of the events we studied still had contemporary resonance, like the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement. In those classes they were very demanding. You had to speak up and say what you think to defend your position.
In the Schwartz class we studied intervention in Korea, the Berlin airlift, the Cuban missile crisis, Vietnam. The loss of China. A lot of these questions still had a lot of politically controversial -- they would call on you to state your point of view and defend it.
Yeah, I think so. Even by the early ‘80s most people thought the Vietnam War was a bad war and that we should have gotten out and should have gotten out earlier, that Johnson and Nixon had been terrible presidents for getting us involved. I thought by the early ‘80s it had become clear what had happened in Vietnam after the U.S. had left, what had happened in Cambodia and Laos -- I wasn’t part of the generation that fought about Vietnam, I was in the generation after that -- so I remember the argument was, Yes, it was militarily difficult and the United States took a lot of casualties, but look at the terrible things that happened after the United States pulled out. And you look at the Korean War, in Korea that didn’t happen, the United States didn’t pull out of Korea and you didn’t have what happened in Southeast Asia afterwards. And by the ‘80s South Korea had become an industrialized country and was becoming a democracy. So to me I sort of went, Well, is the conventional story about Vietnam really true?
But you’re still talking about questions that are politically hot button issues.
I don’t know. In Vietnam there was a lot of loss of life, suppression of civil liberties -- they’re still a communist dictatorship. You’re right, they’re trying to imitate China. But to me, when I look at the terrible things that are happening in Korea today and have been happening since the Korean War, if North Korea had taken over the entire peninsula, that would happen to a lot more people. You never would have had the success in South Korea that you see today. There’s a striking photo from space of Korea at nighttime and it’s all lights, and a completely black gap where North Korea is.
Iran-Contra? I remember that very clearly, watching the hearings on TV, I guess in the summer of ‘87. The other thing I remember very clearly from that period was watching the Bork hearings. It was sort of towards then that I became more interested in constitutional law, or just law, rather than just history or politics.
I had never read a book about constitutional law. The Constitution just appeared in my history courses, primarily about the Civil War. I just remember Bork, with his qualifications, and all the things he’d done. The hearings seemed -- I thought he was mistreated by the Senate. I was very struck by that.
But I also remember the Iran Contra affair, and I do remember being very disappointed in Reagan saying he didn’t remember authorizing it, but he must have authorized it. I still think what Congress did was perfectly constitutional -- they cut off funding for the Contras and Congress has complete control of the purse and the president can’t try to funnel money to the Contras in violation of that statute, so I thought that was perfectly legitimate by the Congress. Somebody in the administration definitely violated the law. Even after all the investigations no one seems to know if Reagan understood what he was doing or knew, but I think they violated the law.
I’ve never actually agreed with the views of the president’s constitutional defenders on Iran-Contra, although they are not many. Mr. Benson today expressed the view I have: Congress has lots of powers. They don’t use them often, but they have the complete power of funding.
I wasn’t a cultural conservative in the sense that I went to college and didn’t like the liberal culture of the day. I was definitely in dissent of the conventional politics of a college campus in the 1980s. Every now and then I would see people protesting this or that, and I thought, You’re at Harvard with all this opportunity all around you -- you’re wasting it by protesting. It seemed to me a waste of time. There was so much stuff you could do there. I think it was South African divestment then. It wasn’t that I agreed with apartheid at all, but to spend all that time protesting it just seemed to me a waste of the limited time you had. You’re lucky enough to be there.
I know other conservatives think college is too much drinking, too much smoking. That certainly wasn’t me at all. I don’t think I’ve changed my basic political views much since then. When it comes to domestic social policy, I’m basically a libertarian. I don’t want Huckabee to tell us what our morality should be. I feel Reagan was much more conservative on foreign policy or the economy but not on welfare rates or abortion.
In the op-eds I’ve written since I left the administration I’ve been quite critical of some of their social policies. I thought the gay rights amendment was ridiculous and I wrote a pretty long op-ed attacking it. I just don’t think the federal government should be deciding whether gay people can be married or not. And I don’t think the Constitution should be telling us whether gay people should be married or not. I think the states should decide, like they decide all kinds of questions about families. As a voter I would vote for gay marriage. I also wrote an op-ed about abortion. I said I don’t think the federal government should decide it, I think the states should decide it, and if it was voted on in California I would vote for abortion rights.
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