Author of Torture, Spy Memos Was Just Doing His Job: Via Threat Level.

The government lawyer who wrote memos authorizing the Bush administration to engage in torture and warrantless surveillance says he was just doing his job, according to a recent interview.

Asked by the New York Times if he regretted writing the torture memos, former Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo replied, “No, I had to write them. It was my job. As a lawyer, I had a client. The client needed a legal question answered.”

Yoo, whose memos offered the government legal justification for its actions, said his client was former President Bush and the U.S. government as a whole. The Times asked whether it wasn’t the case that the U.S. people was his client, and not the president. Yoo replied, “If there’s a conflict between the president and the Congress, then you have to pick one or the other.”

Yoo, who has written a book titled “Crisis in Command,” described as a history of “audacious power grabs by American presidents going back to George Washington,” says that Abraham Lincoln takes the prize as the president who most egregiously defied Congress and violated laws.

“He sent the Army into offensive operations to try to stop the South from seceding,” Yoo said. “He didn’t call Congress into special session until July 4, 1861, well after this had all happened. He basically acted on his own for three months.”

Asked if Yoo was citing Lincoln’s actions during the Civil War in order to justify President Bush’s expansion of executive power during the Iraq War, Yoo replied that the authors of the Constitution always intended that a president’s powers would expand with the circumstances to allow him to respond to crises quicky.

Yoo argued in a Wall Street Journal editorial published earlier this year that in wartime, the president should have almost unlimited power.

Yoo was working in the DoJ’s Office of Legal Counsel when the Bush administration tapped him to write the classified memos on torture and warrantless surveillance as an end-run around his Justice Department superiors.

Yoo’s direct supervisor, Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee, told the inspectors general that he had no role in the memos and was not even “read into” the surveillance program. He had no idea how Yoo “became the White House’s guy” to advise it on serious constitutional matters. Attorney General John Ashcroft also did not learn details about the surveillance program that Yoo was privy to until later.

The surveillance memos have been slammed by congressional representatives and fellow Justice Department officials for misinterpreting the law in order to grant the government de-facto approval for powers it had already secretly seized.

In 2003, Justice Department lawyers who finally read Yoo’s memos said his descriptions of the government’s surveillance programs didn’t accurately represent the nature of the surveillance the government was doing. This led to a now-famous showdown at the hospital bedside of Attorney General John Ashcroft as the administration tried desperately to keep the Justice Department from shutting down a datamining surveillance project. FBI director Robert Mueller and Deputy Attorney General James Comey threatened to resign over the program unless it was brought into compliance with the law.

Last July, five inspectors general from several agencies released a report questioning the Bush administration’s legal grounds for launching the surveillance programs without approval from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The IG’s stopped short of calling the programs illegal but called Yoo’s memos justifying the surveillance flawed.

In addition to his comments about the memos, Yoo told the Times in their recent interview that he never met President Bush or Vice President Dick Cheney and was not the White House insider people think he was.

“So you’re saying you were just one notch above an intern, you and Monica Lewinsky?,” the Times asked him.

“She was much closer to the president than I ever was,” Yoo replied.

See also:

• Bush’s Secret NSA Spying May Have Tainted Proseuctions, Report Warns

Read Original Article:(Via Threat Level.)