John Choon Yoo (Korean: 유준; born July 10, 1967) is a South Korean-born American legal scholar and former government official who is the Emanuel S. Heller Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley. While serving in the George W. Bush administration, he became known for his legal opinions concerning executive power, warrantless wiretapping, and the Geneva Conventions.
Yoo 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. The legal guidance on interrogation authored by Yoo and his successors in the OLC were rescinded by President Barack Obama in 2009. Some called for investigating and prosecuting 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. 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.
Yoo was born on July 10, 1967, in Seoul, South Korea. His parents, who were teenagers during the Korean War, became medical doctors before moving to the United States when Yoo was three months old. Because of their experience as war refugees, Yoo's parents were anti-communist.
After immigrating to the United States with his family as an infant, Yoo grew up in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He attended high school at Episcopal Academy and graduated in 1985. He then studied American history at Harvard University, where he was the deputy editorial chairman of The Harvard Crimson. He wrote his senior thesis on the foreign policy of presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon B. Johnson under the supervision of historian Brian Balogh.
In 1989, Yoo graduated from Harvard College with a Bachelor of Arts, summa cum laude, with membership in Phi Beta Kappa, and won the college's Washburn Prize and Detur Prize for academic achievement. He then enrolled at Yale Law School, where he became an editor of The Yale Law Journal, and earned a Juris Doctor (J.D.) in 1992.
After law school, Yoo was a law clerk to Judge Laurence H. Silberman of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit from 1992 to 1993 and to Justice Clarence Thomas of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1994 to 1995. He served as general counsel of the Senate Judiciary Committee from 1995 to 1996.
Since 1993, Yoo has been a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, 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. 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.
Bush administration (2001–2003)
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. 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. 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.
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. 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. 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.
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 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 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.
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." Cassel followed up with "Also no law by Congress—that is what you wrote in the August 2002 memo," to which Yoo replied, "I think it depends on why the President thinks he needs to do that."
Criminal proceedings against Yoo have begun in Spain: in a move that could have led to an extradition request, Judge Baltasar Garzón in March 2009 referred a case against Yoo to the chief prosecutor. The Spanish Attorney General recommended against pursuing the case.
On November 14, 2006, invoking the principle of command responsibility, the German attorney Wolfgang Kaleck filed a complaint with the Attorney General of Germany (Generalbundesanwalt) against Yoo, along with 13 others, for his alleged complicity in torture and other crimes against humanity at Abu Ghraib in Iraq and Guantánamo Bay. Kaleck acted on behalf of 11 alleged victims of torture and other human rights abuses, as well as about 30 human rights activists and organizations. The co-plaintiffs to the war crimes prosecution included Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, Martín Almada, Theo van Boven, Sister Dianna Ortiz, and Veterans for Peace. Responding to the so-called "torture memoranda," Scott Horton noted