A Torturous Interview: John Yoo Does The Daily Show (VIDEO)

Gotta give him points for bravery: former Bush Department of Justice lawyer and “torture memo” author John Yoo submitted himself to Jon Stewart’s questioning on The Daily Show last night (insert cheesy “enhanced interrogation” joke here), and it was a real doozy.

While the bulk of it was a mind-numbingly convoluted back-and-forth over what is and isn’t torture, whether or not there are any legal or historical precedents for America’s waging of the war on terror post-9/11, and how much executive power is too much; there was one crystal clear and very revealing gem buried in part 2 of the interview: Yoo says he never actually spoke to President George W. Bush about the legal justifications he was tasked by the administration with developing. Said Yoo, “I’ve never met the man.”

Here’s the full, unedited interview in 3 parts:

In Part 1 Yoo claims that America had never really addressed the question of what is or isn’t torture until after the attacks of September 11, 2001:

In Part 2, along with revealing the fact that he’s never met George W. Bush, Yoo explains how historically executive powers expand and shrink as wars come and go, and asserts that “our greatest presidents” were expanders:

And in Part 3 John Yoo sums it all up with the belief that at the end of the day, giving a president the power to “make those good decisions” outweighs the cost of “sometimes having presidents who make the bad ones.”