Meeting Professor Torture

Guantanamo Bay has just marked its fifth anniversary. John Yoo was instrumental in setting up the prison camp which the normally solidly pro-American Daily Mail has called ‘the sort of show that once only dictators like Joseph Stalin and Chairman Mao knew how to put on’. Yet Yoo’s infamy in America derives less from clearing the legal way for Guantanamo than from being the author of the ‘Torture Memo’, a legal opinion filed on 2 August 2002 by the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), a section of the Department of Justice. It examined what methods of inflicting pain and suffering constitute torture, and whether the President can order torture if he thinks it necessary.
Yoo’s memo was leaked to the press in the summer of 2004, in the aftermath of the publication of the pictures of American soldiers torturing Iraqi detainees inside Abu Ghraib prison. Overnight he became a celebrity — but for all the wrong reasons. He