John Yoo

Yoo cited an 1873 Supreme Court ruling, on the Modoc Indian Prisoners, where the Supreme Court had ruled that Modoc Indians were not lawful combatants, so they could be shot, on sight, to justify his assertion that individuals apprehended in Afghanistan could be tortured.

John Choon Yoo (born July 10, 1967) is a South Korean-born American legal scholar and former government official who serves as the Emanuel S. Heller Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley.

Yoo became known for his legal opinions concerning executive power, warrantless wiretapping, and the Geneva Conventions while serving in the George W. Bush administration, during which he was the author of the controversial "Torture Memos" in the War on Terror.

As the deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) of the Department of Justice, Yoo wrote the Torture Memos to determine the legal limits for the torture of detainees following the September 11 attacks.

Yoo was born on July 10, 1967, in Seoul, South Korea.

His parents were anti-communist, having been refugees during the Korean War.

He immigrated to the United States with his family when he was a young child and grew up in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

He attended high school at Episcopal Academy, graduating in 1985.

While a student there, Yoo studied Greek and Latin.

Yoo matriculated at Harvard University where he majored in American history and was a member of The Harvard Crimson.

He graduated in 1989 with a Bachelor of Arts, summa cum laude, with membership in Phi Beta Kappa.

He then attended Yale Law School, where he was a member of the Yale Law Journal, graduating with a J.D. in 1992.

After law school, Yoo was a law clerk for Judge Laurence H. Silberman of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit from 1992 to 1993 and for Justice Clarence Thomas of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1994 to 1995.

Yoo has been a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law since 1993, where he is the Emanuel S. Heller Professor of Law.

He has written multiple 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.

He served as general counsel of the Senate Judiciary Committee from 1995 to 1996.

Yoo argued in his legal opinion that the president was not bound by the American War Crimes Act of 1996.

Yoo's legal opinions were not shared by everyone 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.

Yoo has been principally associated with his work from 2001 to 2003 in the Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) under Attorney General John Ashcroft during the George W. Bush Administration.

Yoo's expansive view of presidential power led to a close relationship with Vice President Dick Cheney's office.

He 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.

In what was originally known as the Bybee memo, Yoo asserted that executive authority during wartime allows waterboarding and other forms of torture, which were euphemistically referred to as "enhanced interrogation techniques" were issued to the CIA.

Yoo's memos narrowly defined torture and American habeas corpus obligations.

Since 2003, Yoo has also been a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington.

He wrote a monthly column, "Closing Arguments", for The Philadelphia Inquirer.

He has written academic books including Crisis and Command.

In December 2003, Yoo's memo on permissible interrogation techniques was repudiated as legally unsound by the OLC, then under the direction of Jack Goldsmith.

On March 14, 2003, Yoo wrote a legal opinion memo in response to the General Counsel of the Department of Defense, in which he concluded that torture not allowed by federal law could be used by interrogators in overseas areas.

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.

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 in which 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 December 2005, Doug Cassel, a law professor from the University of Notre Dame, asked Yoo, "If the President deems that he's got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person's child, there is no law that can stop him?", to which Yoo replied, "No treaty."

Yoo's contribution to these memos has remained a source of controversy following his departure from the Justice Department; he was called to testify before the House Judiciary Committee in 2008 in defense of his role.

The legal guidance on interrogation authored by Yoo and his successors in the OLC were rescinded by President Barack Obama in 2009.

Some individuals and groups called for the investigation and prosecution of Yoo under various anti-torture and anti-war crimes statutes.

A report by the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility stated that Yoo's justification of waterboarding and other "enhanced interrogation methods" constituted "intentional professional misconduct" and recommended that Yoo be referred to his state bar association for possible disciplinary proceedings.

In 2009, President Barack Obama issued Executive Order 13491, rescinding the legal guidance on interrogation authored by Yoo and his successors in the Office of Legal Counsel.

Senior Justice Department lawyer David Margolis overruled the report in 2010, saying that Yoo and Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee—who authorized the memos—had exercised "poor judgment" but that the department lacked a clear standard to conclude misconduct.