Response to Professor Yoo

[Jack Rabbit]

Professor John Yoo, one of the architects of the Bush regime's policy toward detainees in the war on terror, wrote a piece in the Wall Street Journal today condemning President Obama's decision to close the detainee facility at Guantánamo Naval Base and to end the policy of torture, called "enhanced interrogation techniques" by Yoo and other members of the regime and by their cheerleaders in the right wing punditocracy.

Mr. Yoo argues:

• The civilian law-enforcement system cannot prevent terrorist attacks;
• The government will be unable to get more information from captured al Qaeda terrorists.

Mr. Yoo, who is himself a potential defendant in any future war crimes trials, lacks the credibility to make such assertions. Moreover, his case for keeping Guantánamo open is every bit as fact free as was the Bush regime's case to go to war against Iraq.

First of all, I don't view those lawyers, including Professor Yoo, who advised Mr. Bush on what is legal concerning detainees, so much as bona fide legal advisors as co-conspirators with Bush and Cheney to trash the Geneva Conventions and the Convention against Torture. Yoo, Alberto Gonzales, Jay Bybee and others should be prosecuted for war crimes along with Bush and Cheney. The legal reason is too spurious to take seriously. Their mission was to give the former regime legal cover by redefining torture in a way that waterboarding would not be torture, when no reasonable person would say otherwise.

Yoo's pleas that Guantánamo remain open that torture continue are based on the dubious propositions that civilian courts are insufficient to keep us safe from terrorism and that torture works. To the first proposition I offer the trial and conviction of José Padilla as a refutation. Try as they might, Bush and his legal henchmen could not keep American citizen Padilla from being tried in federal court for terrorist-related charges. Padilla had his day in court and was convicted. It would appear to me that an ordinary federal court was quite sufficient to keep the American public safe from Mr. Padilla. Mr. Yoo also compares the Guantánamo detainees to pirates, "illegal combatants who do not fight on behalf of a nation and refuse to obey the laws of war." However, this is a false analogy. A pirate, when captured on the high seas, is charged with a crime and brought to court to face trial. Here, he enjoys the rights of due process. On the other hand, Guantánamo detainees are denied due process, including the right to be charged with a crime. Most detainees were never charged with any crime. Indeed, the purpose of Guantánamo was to violate the human rights of the detainees to a fair trial and any protection against torture or other harsh or humiliating interrogation techniques.

As for torture itself, which Mr. Yoo defends along with such erudite spokesmen of the lunatic fringe as Sean Hannity, not only is it universally condemned as cruel, but it doesn't work. A subject being tortured will likely say anything to get his interrogators to stop. Consequently, nothing a torture victim says should be taken at face value. That includes Khalid Sheik Mohammad, who confessed to being the mastermind behind the September 11 attacks but to a number of other schemes, some never carried out. It also includes Ibn al Shaykh al Libbi, who under interrogation by waterbording in 2002 told investigators that the Iraqi government trained al Qaida members to use biochemical weapons. We know now that this is not true, yet by falling back on this kind of "information", the Bush regime cited as a fact the working relationship between Saddam's regime and Osama's terror network. The only thing torture worked for in this instance was telling neoconservatives what they wanted to hear, which were talking points and not necessarily facts. Bush and the neocons didn't care about the facts. They were lying and they knew they were lying when they told us they had reliable information about Saddam's weapons and his ties to al Qaida. Like the legal memoranda approving torture itself, the intelligence gained by torture was suspect at best and worthless at worst.

Speaking about sources we should not take at face value, we have only the word of former Bush regime spokesmen such as Professor Yoo and Mr. Cheney and sycophants like Sean Hannity that valuable information was gained by harsh interrogation techniques. Against this is an article by journalist David Rose that appeared in December's Vanity Fair that states counterterrorist officials on both sides of the Atlantic conclude unanomously that "coercive methods" failed to provide "significant levels of actionable intelligence." Moreover, in the specific case of Khalid Sheik Mohammad, Rose quotes a senior Pentagon analyst as saying, "K.S.M. produced no actionable intelligence. He was trying to tell us how stupid we were."

Mr. Yoo shouldn't tell the public the kind of nonsense that appears today under his by-line in The Wall Street Journal. He should save it for the judge.