In wartime, this lawyer has got Bush's back - Los Angeles Times
"Yoo doesn't employ the usual rationale for a strong Bush presidency. He says in his book that it is not the 9/11 terrorist attacks that justify the extraordinary presidential powers he advocates. In Yoo's view, the constitution itself gives the president lots of leeway, allowing him to invade Iraq without congressional permission and to disregard such treaties as the Geneva Convention, which governs the moral code of conduct of war.
"I'm pretty sure that's an argument no one has ever made before," Yoo, 38, said recently with evident pride. Most people, he said, "say the world's too dangerous and the Constitution's obsolete."
Michael Glennon, a professor of international law at Tufts University, believes that Yoo "sees the president essentially as an elected king."
"It strains the imagination to believe that those who wrote our Constitution could so quickly forget the danger that flows from unlimited power," Glennon said. "If the framers truly intended to create a Sun King, why did they explicitly assign so many powers to the Congress?"
To answer this question, Yoo relies partly on the dictionary. Although the Constitution gives Congress the exclusive power to "declare" war, that wording doesn't mean the president needs to consult Congress to "make war" or "commence war," Yoo's book says.
Yoo's critics say this relegates Congress to the role of an ambassador making a courtesy call: Excuse me, in case you hadn't noticed, we're bombing you to smithereens.
... president has this whole set of powers in matters of defense that Congress cannot override," said Sofaer, now a senior fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution. "I don't believe there are any powers that the president has that Congress cannot override."
What most concerns him, Sofaer said, are Yoo's views on the treatment of detainees.
"The torture convention is written specifically for people who think their emergency is different than any other emergency in human history," Sofaer said. "You can't just say that because you happen to be governing the United States during an attack unprecedented since Pearl Harbor, that all the conventions governing the rules of war go out the window."
... 'In the war against Al Qaeda, the Geneva Convention doesn't apply,' Yoo explained in November on C-Span. 'Al Qaeda is not a nation. Under the McCain amendment, all we could do is question people…. The real effect of the McCain amendment would be to shut down coercive interrogation.'
To Yoo, it is crystal clear who gets to decide the difference between coercive interrogation and torture abroad.
'Outside the United States it would be the president,' Yoo said. 'If the president thinks that because of an extraordinary need to protect the country, he needs to order an interrogation, he needs to be able to do that.
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