The New York Times, February 13, 2010 by Daniel Weintraub
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/14/us/14sfpolitics.html?scp=1&sq=Berkeley&st=cse
Mr. Yoo attributes the demand to the unusual nature of the course, which allows students to exercise their legal creativity. “There is no right answer,” he said.
-Real Clear Politics, February 7, 2010 Host Fareed Zakaria
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/printpage/?url=http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2010/02/07/interview_with_john_yoo_on_the_treatment_of_detainees_100213.html
I think, actually, a lot of the confusion in the foreign policy community, in the United States and other countries, is that for the first time we’ve confronted this kind of enemy, and we’re actually trying to develop a regime of legal rules that actually apply to them.
-The New York Times, February 10, 2010 by Adam Liptak
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/11/us/11law.html
Allowing any sort of contributions to terrorist organizations “simply because the donor intends that they be used for ‘peaceful’ purposes directly conflicts with Congress’s determination that no quarantine can effectively isolate ‘good’ activities from the evil of terrorism.”
-The Oakland Tribune, February 11, 2010 by Elizabeth Pfeffer
http://www.insidebayarea.com/oaklandtribune/localnews/ci_14385653
Yoo’s response to accusations that he provided the Bush administration with justifications for using torture has been that he only set the limits of what would be crossing the line. That line, according to Yoo, can be interpreted differently by the president depending on national security.
-San Mateo Daily Journal, February 12, 2010 by Bill Silverfarb
http://www.smdailyjournal.com/article_preview.php?id=124970
“I have no problem debating people who disagree with me. That’s how you determine what is right, ultimately,” Yoo told the Daily Journal.
-San Francisco Chronicle, January 16, 2010 by Carolyn Lochhead
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/01/16/MNA51BIQN7.DTL&type=printable
“The law doesn’t compel anyone to make any policy decision,” Yoo said. “The war in Iraq was legal. That doesn’t compel the choice to go to war.”
-NPR, All Things Considered, January 19, 2010 Host Madeleine Brand
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=122734173
“You look at who most scholars think are our greatest presidents, men like Washington, Lincoln and FDR. These are presidents who were no shrinking violets. They embraced their power. They used their powers vigorously to attack the challenges of their day often, or sometimes, in direct conflict with the Congress and the Supreme Court. ”
-KGO AM 810, January 20, 2010 Host Gil Gross
http://www.kgoam810.com/Article.asp?id=1667684&nId=15&spid=25697
“We were less than a year after 9/11 and the government had captured … people who really planned and executed the 9/11 attacks themselves and were responsible for planning other future Al Qaeda attacks. And the government, the CIA, came to the justice department and the White House and said, ‘What can we do that’s legal?’”
-The New York Times, January 21, 2010 by Walter Isaacson
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/24/books/review/Isaacson-t.html
As the United States entered a semipermanent state of national emergency, marked by multiple wars and boosts in defense spending, power naturally flowed to the presidency, Yoo writes. The cold war brought forth one of the framers’ great fears, a large standing army in peacetime.
-The Washington Post, January 10, 2010 by Jack Rakove
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/08/AR2010010801498.html
The great lesson of this past decade of misrule has been that our system works best when all three institutions are fully engaged. However much we celebrate the heroic presidents, Americans, as a people, have a stake in seeing the whole government achieve its potential. Yet what Yoo forces us to confront is the reality of all the striking advantages the executive enjoys. It is, in its way, an enticing portrait of presidential power—and a disturbing one.
-The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, January 11, 2010 Host Jon Stewart
http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/mon-january-11-2010/john-yoo-pt–1
“In the end, it is still good for us to have the President able to make those good decisions, even at the cost of sometimes having Presidents who make the bad ones. It’s worth it to our system to be able to have a Lincoln or an FDR, even if the price is to have someone like a Nixon…. I think that’s part of the price we have to have in our system in order to be able to respond quickly to terrible challenges to the country.”
-Forbes, January 15, 2010 by Peter Robinson
http://www.forbes.com/2010/01/14/john-yoo-national-security-afghanistan-opinions-columnists-peter-robinson.html
As Yoo argues in the masterful new book he has just published, Crisis and Command: A History of Executive Power from George Washington to George W. Bush, the Founders intended the authority of the chief executive to remain flexible. “The president’s powers are meant to fluctuate,” Yoo explained, “expanding in emergencies then retracting in peacetime.”
-The Wall Street Journal, January 15, 2010 by Arthur Herman
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703436504574641210437351786.html#printMode
Crisis and Command is a carefully argued historical survey of the evolution of presidential power, particularly the power to make war. The book reveals how the Bush war on terror, far from overstepping constitutional bounds, was rooted in a tradition that reaches back to George Washington himself.
The Philadelphia Inquirer, January 10, 2010 by John Yoo
http://www.philly.com/inquirer/currents/81082822.html
Has the Obama administration retarded the integration of information by our intelligence agencies out of a touchiness for civil liberties? Some of the administration’s political appointees had attacked the Bush administration’s terrorist policies on exactly such grounds.
The New York Times, December 29, 2009 by Deborah Solomon
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/03/magazine/03fob-q4-t.html?scp=9&sq=Berkeley&st=nyt
“The idea is that the president’s power grows and changes based on circumstances, and that’s what the framers of the Constitution wanted. They wanted it to exist so the president could react to crises immediately.”
The Philadelphia Inquirer, December 20, 2009 by John Yoo
http://www.philly.com/inquirer/currents/79743207.html
When Obama decided to boost troop levels in Afghanistan, he did not go to Congress on bended knee…. If Obama succeeds in bringing the nation through Iraq and Afghanistan, and destroys al-Qaeda, he will have drawn on the same wellsprings of presidential power that sustained Washington, Lincoln, and FDR.
The Philadelphia Inquirer, November 22, 2009 by John Yoo
http://www.philly.com/inquirer/opinion/20091122_Closing_Arguments__No_clear_benefit_to_holding_9_11_trial_in_New_York.html
It certainly doesn’t help those who are already protected by the Bill of Rights and can be tried in civilian courts. If anything, their rights are at risk, not just by a failure to convict terrorists who killed almost 3,000 people, but by the inevitable judicial compromises that must balance the requirements of a fair public trial with the demands of protecting wartime secrets. Those compromises will no longer be limited to the special context of military courts in wartime, but will become part of the law that governs all Americans.
The Wall Street Journal, November 15, 2009 by John Yoo
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704431804574537370665832850.html#printMode
Prosecutors will be forced to reveal U.S. intelligence on KSM, the methods and sources for acquiring its information, and his relationships to fellow al Qaeda operatives. The information will enable al Qaeda to drop plans and personnel whose cover is blown. It will enable it to detect our means of intelligence-gathering, and to push forward into areas we know nothing about.
The Philadelphia Inquirer, September 13, 2009 by John Yoo
http://www.philly.com/inquirer/currents/59146512.html
What has gone less well understood is what the investigation will do to the CIA as an institution at a time when it serves as the nation’s eyes and ears and, sometimes, the sword and shield, during war against a shadowy, covert enemy…. All intelligence involves probabilities and educated guesses, but effective intelligence can actually provide the information needed to avoid costly wars. Persecuting the CIA risks another surprise attack or major intelligence failure.
The Wall Street Journal, July 16, 2009 by John Yoo
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124770304290648701.html#printMode
Unlike, say, Soviet spies working under diplomatic cover, terrorists are hard to identify. Yet they are vastly more dangerous. Monitoring their likely communications channels is the best way to track and stop them. Building evidence to prove past crimes, as in the civilian criminal system, is entirely beside the point. The best way to find an al Qaeda operative is to look at all email, text and phone traffic between Afghanistan and Pakistan and the U.S. This might involve the filtering of innocent traffic, just as roadblocks and airport screenings do.
The Philadelphia Inquirer, July 7, 2009 by John Yoo
http://www.philly.com/inquirer/columnists/20090705_Closing_Arguments__No_more_quotas_The_Supreme_Court_in__quot_Ricci_v__DeStefano_quot__dealt_a_final_blow_to_racially_motivated_hiring__This_is_the_dawning_of_post-racial_America_.html
Candidate Obama said it was time to move beyond identity politics…. That requires us to discard extreme measures such as racial hiring and admission quotas or limits on state elections. While they might have been justified in the 1960s, to eliminate segregation root and branch, they are necessary no longer. The Supreme Court has called on the president and Congress to introduce new measures that no longer manipulate race, and it is up to our elected politicians now to answer.
The New York Times, June 13, 2009 by John Schwartz
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/14/us/politics/14yoo.html?_r=2&scp=7&sq=Berkeley&st=nyt
Mr. Yoo, now a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, did not respond to an e-mail message seeking comment, but in a column he wrote about the suit last year in The Wall Street Journal, he said, “The legal system should not be used as a bludgeon against individuals targeted by political activists to impose policy preferences they have failed to implement via the ballot box.”
The Philadelphia Inquirer, May 10, 2009 by John Yoo
http://www.philly.com/inquirer/currents/20090510_Obama_needs_a_neutral_justice.html
Obama could make a pick based solely on race or sex—though it’s not clear why the most empathetic judges are minorities or women—to please parts of his coalition. But if the president wants to secure the success of his economic, political, and national-security objectives, he should remember FDR’s example and choose a judge who believes in the right of the president and Congress, not the courts, to make the nation’s policies.
Los Angeles Times, April 22, 2009 by Carol J. Williams
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-bybee22-2009apr22,0,2274085.story
“Three thousand of our fellow citizens had been killed in a deliberate attack by a foreign enemyֽ” Yooֽ unruffled by shouts that he is a war criminal and should be in jailֽ told a packed auditorium on the Orange County campus. “That forced us in the government to have to consider measures to gain information using presidential constitutional provisions to protect the country from further attack.”
-The Orange County Register, March 3, 2009 by Eugene W. Fields
http://www.ocregister.com/articles/government-think-legal-2323245-people-decisions
“These memos I wrote were not for public consumption. They lack a certain polish, I think—would have been better to explain government policy rather than try to give unvarnished, straight-talk legal advice. I certainly would have done that differently, but I don’t think I would have made the basic decisions differently.”
-The Wall Street Journal, March 7, 2009 by John Yoo
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123638439733558185.html#printMode
“In these extraordinary circumstances, while our military put al Qaeda on the run, it was the duty of the government to plan for worst-case scenarios—even if, thankfully, those circumstances never materialized. This was not reckless. It was prudent and responsible. While government officials worked tirelessly to prevent the next attack, lawyers, of which I was one, provided advice on unprecedented questions under the most severe time pressures.”
Los Angeles Times, February 11, 2009 by Susannah Rosenblatt
http://articles.latimes.com/2009/feb/11/local/me-yoo11
“I certainly don’t get upset about being criticized,” said Yoo, sitting in his fourth-floor campus office. “I would feel I wasn’t doing my job as an academic if I wasn’t writing or saying things that other people disagreed with.”
The Wall Street Journal, January 29, 2009 by John Yoo
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123318955345726797.html#
While these actions will certainly please his base—gone are the cries of an “imperial presidency”—they will also seriously handicap our intelligence agencies from preventing future terrorist attacks. In issuing these executive orders, Mr. Obama is returning America to the failed law enforcement approach to fighting terrorism that prevailed before Sept. 11, 2001.
The New York Times, January 4, 2009 by John R. Bolton and John Yoo
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/05/opinion/05bolton.html
International agreements that go beyond the rules of international trade and finance—that involve significant national-security commitments, or that purport to delegate lawmaking and enforcement functions to international organizations, or that could fundamentally alter the American constitutional system of individual rights—should receive the intense scrutiny of the treaty process, regardless of their policy merits.
FOX TV, America’s News Headquarters, Dec. 10, 2008 Hosted by Heather Nauert
(Link no longer active)
“It’s very easy to say, ‘Oh, we should shut down Guantanamo Bay, it’s hurting our world image.’ The hard thing is, what do you do when you shut it down?… Where in the United States are we going to house 250 of the worst terrorists, people so bad that we could not convince their own countries to take them back; people who are so bad that … they don’t really care about having a fair trial. They just want to go along and get themselves executed to become martyrs.”