David Cole on John Yoo

It isn't online, unfortunately, but there's a review in the Nov 17,2005
issue of the New York Review of Books by David Cole of a book by John Yoo
called 'The Powers of War and Peace: The Constitution and Foreign Affairs
After 9/11' that is…what? Shocking? Disturbing? You're probably used to it
by now. But here we go.

Here we have a lawyer reviewing another lawyer's book. David Cole is a law
professor at Georgetown and the author of 'Enemy Aliens: Double Standards
and Constitutional Freedoms in the War on Terrorism'. Yoo has returned to
private life in the law faculty at Berkeley.

Here are some excerpts from Cole's review of Yoo:

Few lawyers have had more influence on President Bush's legal policies in
the "war on terror" than John Yoo. This is a remarkable feat, because Yoo
was not a cabinet official, not a Whith House lawyer, and not even a senior
officer in the Justice Department….Yet by all accounts, Yoo had a hand in
virtually every major legal decision involving the US response to the
attacks of September 11, and at every point, so far as we know, his advice
was virtually always the same–the president can do whatever the president
wants.

Yoo's most famous piece of advice was in an August 2002 memorandum stating
that the president cannot constitutionally be barred from ordering torture
in wartime–even though the United States has signed and ratified a treaty
absolutely forbidding turture under all circumstances, and even though
Congress has passed a law pursuant to that treaty, which without any
exception prohibits torture.

In his book, Yoo contends that the president has unilateral authority to
initiate wars without congressional approval, and to interpret, terminate,
and violate international treaties at will. Since leaving the Justice
Department, Yoo has also defended the practice of "extraordinary
renditions," in which the US has kidnapped numerous "suspects" in the war on
terror and "rendered" them to third countries with records of torturing
detainees. He has argued that the federal courts have no right to review
actions by the president that are said to violate the War Powers Clause. And
he has defended the practice of targeted assassinations, otherwise known as
"summary executions."

The Pentagon's National Defense Strategy, issued in March 2005, states: "Our
strength as a nation state will continue to be challenged by those who
employ a strategy of the weak using international fora, judicial processes,
and terrorism."

The proposition that judicial processes–the very essence of the rule of
law–are to be dismissed as a strategy of the weak, akin to terrorism,
suggests the continuing strength of Yoo's influcence. When the rule of law
is seen simply as a device used by terrorists, something has gone perilously
wrong.