In a modest attempt to allow equal time, I note that Esquire magazine has posted what it calls the first interview with John Yoo since this week's release of the latest memo. You can find it here. Not that the interview sheds much light, but my favorite excerpt is when the interviewer presses Yoo on his decision to extract the pain-associated-with-organ-failure-or-death standard from an unrelated statute as a means of fleshing out the definition of the federal crime of torture.
Esquire: But at the same time, you as a human being writing that phrase -- this is not legal theory anymore. We're in the real world and its going to have a body count.
Yoo: This is unpleasant. Don't interpret what I'm saying as though I was happy to do this or eager, or I felt some satisfaction. Mainly because I had read what the British and the Israelis had gone through—they had their own struggle with this issue and they had their own judicial decisions—and I had read all kinds of articles and books about this issue. I mean, it's a difficult issue. You have to draw the line. What the government is doing is unpleasant. It's the use of violence. I don't disagree with that. But I also think that part of the job unfortunately of being a lawyer sometimes is you have to draw those lines. I think I could have written it in a much more—we could have written it in a much more palatable way, but it would have been vague.
Can't tell from this whether the greater unpleasantness for Yoo is in the topic or in the interview.
