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 was held personally responsible for Abu Ghraib’s horrors: the disgusting behaviour by US service personnel was seen as the bottom of the slippery slope down which Yoo had started America’s military sliding when he wrote the Torture Memo.
‘That was totally absurd,’ he tells me when we meet for lunch in a restaurant opposite his office at the Boalt School of Law, Berkeley, California. ‘Two bipartisan Congressional reports and several military investigations showed that the Pentagon hadn’t even read the memo. Disgraceful behaviour of the kind which took place at Abu Ghraib had nothing to do with interrogation policy. Similar things have happened in practically every war. What was different was that this time they had cameras on their mobiles to photograph it…. But the idea that what went on in Abu Ghraib would never have happened without that memo is just silly.’
That,