Yoo: I Thought Torture Was A Bad Idea, Really I Did

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John Yoo, speaking to Esquire:

“I did not think as a matter of policy that it was a good idea for the military to use aggressive interrogations of the kind that would be permitted to the CIA,” he said, adding that he expressed those reservations “to officials higher up the chain of command.”…

“The memo released yesterday does not apply to Iraq. It applied to interrogations of al Qaeda detained at Guantanamo Bay. I don’t [necessarily] agree that the methods did migrate to Iraq, because I don’t know for a fact that they did. The analysis of the memo released yesterday was not to apply to Iraq, and we made clear in other settings that the Geneva Conventions fully applied to the war in Iraq. There was no intention or desire that the memo released yesterday apply to Iraq.”

Of course, Yoo was just a lawyer in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, so it is true that it was not his call what to do as a matter of policy. He was just the consigliere.

But nothing can erase the fact that it is, in fact, his legal analysis that’s been dropping jaws for the past two days.

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