John Yoo, the former Deputy Attorney General at the agency's Office of Legal Counsel, who drafted the infamous "torture memos" that gave former President George W. Bush and CIA interrogators the legal cover they needed to torture suspected terrorist detainees, offered some clues behind the genesis of the August 2002 legal opinions.



Yoo suggested in no uncertain terms that Bush administration officials sought to legalize torture and that he and his boss, Jay Bybee, fixed the law around the Bush administration's policy.

Yoo, who is now a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley, insisted that he only drafted the legal memos and that other officials decided what interrogation techniques were permissible. The

"Decisions about interrogation methods at Guantanamo Bay were made by the Defense Department," said Yoo in testimony before the House Judiciary subcommittee on the Constitution last year.



But Yoo appears to be splitting hairs. While it may be true that higher-ups in the Bush administration, including President Bush, had greater responsibility for approving the techniques, indeed, Yoo admitted in an editorial published Thursday in the Wall Street Journal that George W. Bush authorized waterboarding "three times in the years after 9/11," Yoo was not just the detached legal scholar that he has portrayed.

On Wednesday, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a Freedom of Information Act request to obtain still secret memos that Yoo and others at the DOJ drafted.

The DOJ's Office of Professional Responsibility has been investigating whether "the legal advice contained in those memoranda [written by Yoo and Bybee] was consistent with the professional standards that apply to Department of Justice attorneys."

The results of the investigation could lead to a criminal probe.

In his 2006 book, War by Other Means: An Insider's Account on the War On Terror, Yoo described his participation in meetings that helped develop the controversial policies for the treatment of detainees.



For instance, Yoo wrote about a trip he took to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, with other senior administration officials to observe interrogations and to join in discussions about specific interrogation methods.