Sometimes You Have to Draw Lines: John Yoo Responds

Just yesterday Glenn Greenwald accused John Yoo of war crimes.

Greenwald, of course, is leading the left's blogospheric attack on Yoo, who was Assistant Attorney General at the Office of Legal Counsel, and the reviled author of the "torture memos" outlining the Bush administration's enhanced interrogation techniques.

It turns out that Yoo's got an interview forthcoming in Esquire, which is excerpted today. I particulary liked Yoo's response to the jab that he's not the kind of guy who'd employ purportedly inhumane definitions of torture, like this:

...intense pain or suffering of the kind that is equivalent to the pain that would be associated with serious injury so severe that death, organ failure or permanent damage resulting in a loss of significant body functions will likely result.

Here's Yoo's reply to this "not-the-kind-of-guy" angle:

This is unpleasant. Don’t interpret what I’m saying as oh I was happy to do this or eager, or I felt some satisfaction. Mainly because I had read what the British and the Israelis had gone through -- they had their own struggle with this issue and they had their own judicial decisions -- and I had read all kinds of articles and books about this issue. I mean, it’s a difficult issue. You have to draw the line. What the government is doing is unpleasant. It’s the use of violence. I don’t disagree with that. But I also think that part of the job unfortunately of being a lawyer sometimes is you have to draw those lines. I think I could have written it in a much more -- we could have written it in a much more palatable way, but it would have been vague.

Read the whole thing.

Yoo's apparently a very mild-mannered fellow who's routinely booed at colloquia and speaking engagements by student antiwar ayatollahs.

In any case, as noted, much is being written this week about extreme interrogations amid the release of Yoo's 2003 legal memorandum, which is widely regarded at supplying the "green light" for coercive methods outside of stateside constitutional channels (for the "green light" meme, see Vanity Fair and Harpers).

Yoo's legal theories, of course, will never be forgiven by the paranoid left. It's not the terrorists seeking our destruction who're dangerous, it's the Bush administration itself.

Never mind the fact that for deeply principled, philosophical reasons we might need to consider the selective use of torture against our enemies. As Jerome Slater has argued in advocating aggressive interrogations:

Put differently, so long as the threat of large-scale terrorist attacks against innocents is taken seriously, as it must be, it is neither practicable nor morally persuasive to absolutely prohibit the physical coercion or even outright torture of captured terrorist plotters—undoubtedly evils, but lesser evils than preventable mass murder. In any case, although the torture issue is still debatable today, assuredly the next major attack on the United States—or perhaps Europe—will make it moot. At that point, the only room for practical choice will be between controlled and uncontrolled torture—if we are lucky. Far better, then, to avoid easy rhetoric and think through the issue while we still have the luxury of doing so.

Slater was writing a few years ago, but now, more than ever, even the slightest mention of torture elicits the most violent knee-jerk reaction among the vanguard of the surrendering antiwar contingents.

But Yoo's right: Sometimes we need to think about this stuff. Sometimes we have to draw those lines between the thinkable and the unthinkable, to think about what indeed needs to be done to protect American national security, unflinchingly, without succumbing to the natural human impulse to recoil from the commitment of requisite acts.