John Yoo
John Yoo
John Choon Yoo is a Korean-American attorney, law professor, and author. Yoo is currently the Emanuel S. Heller Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley. Previously, he served as a political appointee, the Deputy Assistant U.S. Attorney General in the Office of Legal Counsel, Department of Justice, during the George W. Bush administration. He is best known for his opinions concerning the Geneva Conventions that legitimized the War on Terror by the United States. He also authored the...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionEducator
Date of Birth10 June 1967
CountryUnited States of America
There was nothing wrong - and everything right - with analyzing a law that establishes boundaries on interrogation in the war on terrorism.
Applying different standards to al Qaeda does not abandon Geneva, but only recognizes that the U.S. faces a stateless enemy never contemplated by the Conventions.
Human-rights advocates, for example, claim that the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners is of a piece with President Bush's 2002 decision to deny al Qaeda and Taliban fighters the legal status of prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions.
If the Court were to extend its reach to the base, judges could begin managing conditions of confinement, interrogation methods, and the use of information.
Al Qaeda is not a nation-state and it has not signed the Geneva Conventions. It shows no desire to obey the laws of war; if anything it directly violates them by disguising themselves as civilians and attacking purely civilian targets to cause massive casualties.
It is also worth asking whether the strict limitations of Geneva make sense in a war against terrorists.
Nonetheless, Article 5 makes clear that if an Iraqi civilian who is not a member of the armed forces, has engaged in attacks on Coalition forces, the Geneva Convention permits the use of more coercive interrogation approaches to prevent future attacks.
Once the attacks occur, as we learned on Sept. 11, it is too late. It makes little sense to deprive ourselves of an important, and legal, means to detect and prevent terrorist attacks while we are still in the middle of a fight to the death with al Qaeda.
It is the policy of the United States not to engage in torture, and there are federal criminal laws that prohibit torture.
Punishing abuse in Iraq should not return the U.S. to Sept. 10, 2001, in the way it fights al Qaeda, while Osama bin Laden and his top lieutenants remain at large and continue to plan attacks.
While Taliban fighters had an initial claim to protection under the conventions, they lost POW status by failing to obey the standards of conduct for legal combatants: wearing uniforms, a responsible command structure, and obeying the laws of war.
Under the Geneva Convention, for example, a POW is required only to provide name, rank, and serial number and cannot receive any benefits for cooperating.
I believe that the power to declare war is most important in limiting the powers of the national government in regard to the rights of its citizens, but that it does not require Congress to give its approval before the president uses force abroad.
We can guess that the unacceptable conduct of the soldiers at Abu Ghraib resulted in part from the dangerous state of affairs on the ground in a theater of war.