My Email to John Yoo

Dr. Yoo,

It is with great sadness that I read your Op-Ed in today's Times, "How the Presidency Regained Its Balance."

I am not even sure what Constitution you read in law school; it must have been missing a few pages.

Especially depressing was your gloss about official US torture: "It has detained terrorists without formal charges, interrogating some harshly."

Probably spending a lot of time in your office in Washington, and at Berkeley, you don't really know what that sentence means. It's not available online, but I suggest some good reading material for you this month is an article in this month's Harper's called "American Gulag." One of the specific cases it relates is of a man who was arrested (along with his 12-year old son), tortured, and released, because he (and presumably his son) hadn't done anything.

I am not going to rehearse the arguments against torture, but as one of the legal architects of our torture policy, I can only hope that some brave magistrate, in a country with universal jurisdiction over war crimes, serves you with process.

There is a direct line from your pen to water-boarding.

Tom English

Jackson Heights
New York

"The power of the Executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charge known to the law, and particularly to deny him the judgement of his peers, is in the highest degree odious and is the foundation of all totalitarian government whether Nazi or Communist."
Winston Churchill