8:30 PM CDT, April 22, 2009
John Yoo, CIA memo lawyer, goes on offense . . . at a spirited debate Tuesday at Chapman University School of Law, where Yoo is a visiting professor this semester, the author of much of the legal rationale for using waterboarding and other techniques defended his legal guidance as correct and necessary to protect the nation.
"Three thousand of our fellow citizens had been killed in a deliberate attack by a foreign enemy," Yoo told a packed auditorium on the Orange County campus. "That forced us in the government to have to consider measures to gain information using presidential constitutional provisions to protect the country from further attack."
In a war with a non-state enemy that doesn't follow international law, getting information from captured combatants is vital, said Yoo, now a tenured law professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He said 50 percent of U.S. intelligence about Al Qaeda was gleaned from interrogations.
"Was it worth it?" he asked, brushing off the reaction. "We haven't had an attack in more than seven years."
read:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-torture-lawyersapr23,0,3839563.storyIt's remarkable how Yoo is still bragging on getting '50%' of the intelligence the Bush administration used from the tortures he justified in the legal opinions he authored. In Iraq, whatever information they 'gleaned' from torturing detainees to provide links between Saddam and al-Qaeda was obviously tragically flawed and false.
Looking at the meteoric rise in the ranks of (and violence in the name of) al-Qaeda around the world in the period following Yoo's recommended 'enhanced' torture, it's almost impossible to say what violence the interrogations actually prevented. The majority of evidence shows an increase in animosity and opposition to the US, and the swelling of the ranks of those who would identify their resistance to the American military presence and activity across their sovereign borders during the time Yoo is claiming his techniques were keeping us safe.
Heh, so they got most of their 'intelligence' from the tortures . . . like the tripe from the mentally-addled Khalid Shaikh Mohammed rambling about a 'second wave' of attacks supposedly coming right after 9-11.
I'll tell you what the evidence shows . . . 4300 dead American soldiers and the hundreds of thousands of dead wards of our occupations are verdict enough on Yoo and the rest of the Bush bunch who led our nation (and the world) into a clusterfuck of conflict based on what they 'gleaned' from the opportunistic abuses they authored and authorized.
Fuck Yoo.