John Yoo - Career

Career

John Yoo has been a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law since 1993. He wrote two books on presidential power and the war on terrorism, and many articles in scholarly journals and newspapers. He has held the Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Law at the University of Trento and has been a visiting law professor at the Free University of Amsterdam, the University of Chicago, and Chapman University School of Law. Since 2003, Yoo has been a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. He writes a monthly column, entitled "Closing Arguments", for The Philadelphia Inquirer and is author of the book Crisis and Command.

Yoo was a law clerk for Judge Laurence H. Silberman of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. He also served as general counsel of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Yoo is best known for his work from 2001 to 2003 in the Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) in the George W. Bush Administration. In the Justice Department, Yoo's expansive view of presidential power led to a close relationship with Vice President Dick Cheney's office. Yoo played an important role in developing a legal justification for the Bush administration's policy in the war on terrorism, arguing that prisoner of war status under the Geneva Conventions does not apply to "enemy combatants" captured during the war in Afghanistan and held at the Guantánamo Bay detention camp, asserting executive authority to undertake waterboarding and other "enhanced interrogation techniques" regarded as torture by the current Justice Department. Yoo also argued that the president was not bound by the War Crimes Act and provided a legal opinion backing the Bush Administration's warrantless wiretapping program.

Yoo's legal opinions were not shared by some within the Bush Administration. Secretary of State Colin Powell strongly opposed what he saw as an invalidation of the Geneva Conventions, while U.S. Navy general counsel Alberto Mora campaigned internally against what he saw as the "catastrophically poor legal reasoning" and dangerous extremism of Yoo's opinions. In December 2003, Yoo's memo on permissible interrogation techniques, also known as the Bybee memo, was repudiated as legally unsound by the OLC, then under the direction of Jack Goldsmith. In June 2004, another of Yoo's memos on interrogation techniques was leaked to the press, after which it was repudiated by Goldsmith and the OLC.

Yoo's contribution to these memos has remained a source of controversy after his departure from the Justice Department; he was called to testify before the House Judiciary Committee in 2008 in defense of his role. The Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) began investigating Yoo's work in 2004 and in July 2009 completed a report that was sharply critical of his legal justification for waterboarding and other interrogation techniques. The OPR report cites testimony Yoo gave to Justice Department investigators where he claims that the "president's war-making authority was so broad that he had the constitutional power to order a village to be 'massacred'" The OPR report concluded that Yoo had "committed 'intentional professional misconduct' when he advised the CIA it could proceed with waterboarding and other aggressive interrogation techniques against Al Qaeda suspects," although the recommendation that he be referred to his state bar association for possible disciplinary proceedings was overruled by David Margolis, another senior Justice department lawyer. In 2009, Spanish Judge Baltasar Garzón Real launched an investigation of Yoo and five others (known as The Bush Six) for war crimes.