Peter Slevin on John Yoo

From tmorange
Sent Monday, December 26, 2005 12:03 pm
To letters@washpost.com
Subject Peter Slevin on John Yoo

Dear Editors,

Peter Slevin paints and intriguing portrait of right-wing lawyer John Yoo, who writes memos for the White House approving of torture and secret domestic spying programs ("Scholar Stands by Post-9/11 Writings On Torture," Monday, December 26, 2005; Page A03).

"Yoo thinks his critics should understand that he offered legal advice, while others made policy," Slevin writes. This argument is nothing more than a feeble attempt to avoid responsibilty for the positions Yoo advocates. Legal advice enables policy.

"Yoo traces his convictions in no small part to his parents, and Ronald Reagan," Slevin adds. "His father and mother are psychiatrists who grew up in Korea during the Japanese occupation and the Korean War." For someone who "[came] of age in an anti-communist household," however, it's sad to see how the years of careful grooming and tutelage under this country's bastions of right-wing ideology -- courting the Federalist Society and the American Enterprise Institute, clerkships
with Clarence Thomas and Laurence Silberman, squash games with Antonin Scalia --
have yielded an authoritatianism that any reasonable anti-communist would categorically reject.