I recently watched the news. To me the news is the Daily Show with John Stewart. He had John Yoo on the show. John Yoo is a law professor at Berkeley. He also is infamous as the co-author of a little memo called the "Bybee Torture Memo" by some. It's a memo that tries to define the limits of interrogation techniques that are allowable by the U.S. military in overseas combat. It was written shortly after 9/11 and it has been pretty contraversial. One of the "enhanced" interrogation techniques that has been up for discussion is "waterboarding" in which a person is tied to a board with his/her head tilted back and water is poured over his/her face so that it goes into the nose and the victim feels the sensation of drowning.
Yoo admits in the John Stewart interview that he was approached to write it a year after 9/11 and shortly after the capture of a very high ranking, (#3), Al Qaeda terrorist who was resistant to standard interrogation techniques.
John Stewart suggests that he was asked to increase the limits of what is legal to do in an interrogation and Yoo claims he was asked to simply define what was legal to do. I wish John Stewart had pursued this more because it seems to me, after reading up, that Stewart was right and Yoo was stretching the truth a bit. For example, if I have a gun in my hand and there's a pitbull attatched to my leg who is gnawing his way up to my crotch and I ask a lawyer who is passing by, "Hey, dude, can you define what it is legal for me to do in this situation?" I'm really not asking for parameters and the lawyer knows it. I'm asking if it would be legal for me to shoot the dog.
This is something like the line of questioning I wanted J.S. to take. He didn't. He seemed thrown by Yoo's calm demeanor and his sparkling rhetoric.
A little background that will give you an idea of why I wish J.S. had slam dunked this guy. And this is to the best of my knowledge. I'm going by my own internet research so it might be wrong. The Bybee memo was co-written by Yoo and a judge named Bybee. It was an attempt to give the U.S. military a wider range of interrogation techniques by using simplistic and flawed logic to justify these acts under existing laws as "allowable" and burying the flawed logic so deep in legal jargon that it wouldn't be noticed by the general public. If you read it closely it IS permission to torture. At least that's what I get out of it.
The existing laws that govern the limits of interrogation techniques are referred to as Sections 2340 and 2340A. Yoo and Bybee conclude in the memo that taken as a whole these sections prohibit only "extreme" acts declining to require criminal penalties for cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment. These are all okay.
They reason that "extreme" acts result in "severe pain" whether mental or physical and they go ahead and use their own misguided, (and I think intentionally misleading), methods to better define what these mean legally. They decide that they need to look elsewhere in the U.S. Code to see where Congress had previously used the phrase, "severe pain." They found it in statutes defining emergency medical conditions. An emergency medical condition is one "manifesting itself by acute symptoms of blah blah blah including 'severe pain' such that a prudent lay person, who possesses an average knowledge of health and medicine could reasonably expect the absence of immediate medical attention to result in placing the health of the individual in serious jeaopardy, serious impairment to bodily functions, or serious dysfunction of any bodily organ or part." So severe pain is an indicator of a medical emergency.
Nothing wrong so far.
Then they make their giant leap. "The statutes suggest that 'severe pain' as used in section 2340, must rise to a similarly high level in order to constitute torture."
To me this is either a stupid mistake or purposely flawed logic. And we can see from the Daily Show interview, John Yoo is no dummy.
Let's simplify this in case you haven't noticed the logic leap. Imagine these jokers were writing a medical manual on what to do in case of a brain aneurism. A headache is one indicator of a brain aneurism so by their logic every patient with a headache should be operated on to get their brain aneurisms removed.
Medical emergencies and torture both involve severe pain but they are completely different things. That is pretty obvious. So it needed to be written in legalese that nobody would bore themselves to read in order to make it less obvious while accomplishing the objective of legalizing torture.
If you think this is wrong, take the guidelines proposed by this memo and apply a technique commonly agreed upon as torture to them: putting bamboo shoots under the fingernails. This will not put the victim's health in serious jeopardy, it won't impair any bodily functions, (unless you include typing or piano playing as bodily functions), and it will not result in a serious dysfunction of a body organ or part. So it's cool! Same with waterboarding. Same with a LOT of other things that are only limited by the torturers' imaginations.
It's too bad John Stewart concentrated so much on the President's ability to just do whatever he wants anyway in war time. This is something I agree with Yoo on. If there's a guy who has the knowledge to disarm a doomsday device that will kill a billion people waterboard the shit out of him! I don't care! 1 bad guy compared to a billion innocent people is a no-brainer of an executive decision. But as for torture, I think everyone, including guys the Americans call terrorists, deserve humane treatment.
Throughout the interview, and I watched the entire interview, I sympathised with J.S. Yoo, (who is Korean American), is VERY much like a lot of the people I deal with over here. They have their dishonest objectives and even though I totally noticed their not-so-clever ways of trying to hide them, they talk in circles to the point where the stress of trying to explain your point to them far outweighs the suffering created by the dishonest objective. I can't tell you how often I've felt like soaking my head in ice water after meeting with the supervisor here trying to explain how they are supposed to do things that they promise to do in the contract, or other such things. Now Jon Stewart knows what it'd be like to work in Korea.
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