The Real John Yoo

Jon Stewart opened his interview last night with John Yoo by inviting Yoo to give himself a pity party. “You are infamous. Do you feel that … people have impassioned feelings about you without knowing you? Do you feel that’s unfair.”

Yoo gently answered: “The same thing must happen to you.”

That’s the John Yoo I know – modest, realistic, and smilingly tough.

Stewart then tossed him the opposite pitch. “Are you a good lawyer?”

Yoo, startled, “You mean did Bush ask me that – or are you asking me that?” Then, Yoo pushed this aside too. “Well usually they say that those who can’t do teach.”

Yoo had come to the interview to elucidate a couple of simple points. The question he had been asked by the security arm of government was not, “How can we torture?” but “What can we do that isn’t torture?” Yoo is a lawyer, not an expert in interrogation. He did not recommend techniques. He tried to do something that the U.S. government had not done before: define the legal limit of the permissible.

Maybe that job should never have been assigned. Possibly Yoo’s answer was wrong. (Knowing John, he’d be more than usually open to that second possibility – few people in high government office can ever have had less ego than John Yoo.) But that’s the ground on which he has to be engaged, not in the angels-and-demons style of much of the media coverage … a style that has the incidental effect of recategorizing some of the most brutal enemies the United States has ever faced as pitiful victims.

“We were talking about defining torture. We’d never been asked to define it in the sense of developing things that we could do that would not be torture but would be more uncomfortable than talking. … So you, the legal scholar had to come up with : you can hit them three times with an open hand … but you have to be smiling.”

Yoo: “That’s kind of what this is like.”

Part of the problem for Stewart was his own inability to transcend in this case the conventional liberal categories of thought. So at one point he asked Yoo whether he would equate the Emancipation Proclamation with the so-called torture memos. Stewart apparently could not conceptualize that the Emancipation Proclamation as ever having been constitutionally controversial – although of course it was, bitterly so. To use executive power to alter property relations? How was that a war power?

Unflappable, self-effacing – “I don’t know whether the Iraq war was the right thing to do. The Constitution does not prevent people from making stupid decisions.”

Stewart , baffled and flummoxed, “You are the most charming torturer I have ever met.”

Yoo: “We left space on the back of the back for those words.”

The last words from Stewart: “My mind is blown, quite frankly.” And then a confession: “I do feel not very equipped to handle this discussion.”

On that last, Stewart is unfair to himself. He’s a very intelligent man, with a quick mastery of many subjects. If Stewart was balked here, it was not because he was overwhelmed by the subject’s abstruseness, but because confronted directly with its details, the subject revealed itself as more difficult than usually presented – and Yoo, the man cast as monster, revealed himself to be what he should long ago have been credited as: a conscientious public servant, trying to do the best job he knew how to do to protect his country in time of declared war.