John Choon Yoo, a 42-year old native of South Korea, joined the law faculty at Berkeley in 1993, then clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. For one year, he served as general counsel of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee. By 2001, President Bush found his concept of a more powerful presidency so attractive that he appointed him deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel in the U.S. Department of Justice. There he was to work on issues involving foreign affairs, national security, and the separation of powers.
Masquerading as an expert on torture, Yoo and other high-ranking administration lawyers soon asserted that President Bush could bypass the Geneva Conventions and declare waterboarding and other cruel interrogation techniques legally permissible. Yoo apparently thought that his arbitrary rulings could protect the advocates and practitioners of torture from criminal prosecution. Surveying Yoo’s rulings, one finds them way out of line with the vast majority of legal and ethical thought in our country and other democracies.
Right from the start of his work at the Justice Department, Yoo claimed that America’s "right to self defense” justified warrantless searches under the Fourth Amendment. He told the armed forces they could ignore the takings clause of the Fifth Amendment and even override the First Amendment.
Another Yoo opinion insisted that the President could suspend any provisions of the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty, or any other treaty, without even telling the Senate or our treaty partners. “We conclude,” Yoo wrote, "that as Commander in Chief and Chief Executive, the President has the plenary constitutional power to detain and transfer prisoners captured in war. We also conclude that neither the GPW [Third Geneva Convention] nor the Torture Convention restrict the President's legal authority to transfer prisoners captured in the Afghanistan conflict to third countries. Although the GPW places conditions on the transfer of POWs, neither al-Qaeda nor Taliban prisoners are legally entitled to POW status, and hence there are no GPW conditions placed on their transfer. "
Although U.S. law expressly states that "No citizen shall be imprisoned or otherwise detained by the United States except pursuant to an Act of Congress," Yoo insisted that this rule does not, and constitutionally could not, interfere with the President’s authority to detain U.S. citizens, such as José Padilla.
During a 2005 debate in Chicago, Notre Dame professor Doug Cassel 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?" Yoo replied: "No treaty." Cassel asked again: "Also no law by Congress--that is what you wrote in the August 2002 memo?" Yoo replied: "I think it depends on why the President thinks he needs to do that."
While Yoo continues to insist on the validity of his bizarre legal views, the Obama administration moved quickly to repudiate all his above-mentioned opinions. Yoo's torture memoranda were almost immediately retracted by Jack Goldsmith, the new chief of the Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice.
Numerous legal scholars, however, remain seriously concerned that, in spite of his flawed legal ethics, Yoo continues to teach constitutional and international law at the University of California’s Berkeley School of Law. New York University's Stephen Gillers, for example, would like to see Yoo and like-minded officials of the Bush Justice Department be held accountable. "I think,” said Gillers, “the legal profession in the United States has been seriously hurt by their conduct."