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 waterboarding prisoners and other actions, said his client was former President George W. Bush and the U.S. government as a whole. The Times asked whether it was the case that the U.S. people were 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, which is 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, who currently teaches law at the University of California at Berkeley, 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 Justice Department'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 at the time, former 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 to which Yoo was privy, 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 data-mining 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.

Five inspectors general from several agencies released a report in July 2009 questioning the Bush administration's legal grounds for launching the surveillance programs without approval from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The inspectors general stopped short of calling the programs illegal, but did call Yoo's memos justifying the surveillance flawed.

Yoo's 2003 torture memo (.pdf of Part 1) was the justification the Bush administration used for engaging in "harsh interrorgation techniques" on prisoners being held outside the United States. The memo concluded that U.S. laws and treaties prohibiting torture and inhuman treatment did not apply to interrogators who were questioning al-Qaeda prisoners outside the United Sates and that the president's wartime authority trumped U.S. law.

"If a government defendant were to harm an enemy combatant during an interrogation in a manner that might arguably violate a criminal prohibition," Yoo wrote in the memo, "he would be doing so in order to prevent further attacks on the United States by the al Qaeda terrorist network.

In addition to his comments about the memos, Yoo told the Times in the 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.

Photo courtesy University of California at Berkeley

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