From the History News Network
Dated February 2005
Open Letter to John Yoo
form Professor Mark LeVine
Dear Professor Yoo,
First, I want to thank you for coming to speak and debate at UCI. I opposed your visit as a Chancellor's Distinguished Fellow on the assumption that such an honor should not be bestowed on former government officials whose main claim to distinction is redefining torture almost out of existence and sanctioning the use of cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment by the CIA as long as its on foreigners outside US borders. But I'm happy we had the chance to discuss our very different views of the policies you helped shape and their impact on America's security at home and standing abroad.
Let me, however, correct a few misconceptions you seem to have had about the debate we had prior to your evening lecture. According to the LA Times story on the event, you felt that you were ganged up upon because the other panelists were clearly antagonistic to your position. In fact, the Executive Vice Chancellor of UCI specifically asked the deans of the schools of humanities, social sciences and social ecology to solicit faculty members to join our panel. For whatever reason the only two faculty members across the campus who would agree to share the stage with you were myself and professor Cecelia Lynch of Political Science. While several politically conservative UCI faculty attended the debate, none accepted the invitation to join it. (We did ask that a professional lawyer with experience in human rights and international law be on the panel given your expertise in this area, and Steve Rohde, former head of the Southern California ACLU was nice enough to join us.) It's impossible to know why, but might I suggest that even most conservatives feel that it's impossible to defend your support for untrammeled (and by almost universal consensus, unconstitutional) presidential power, not to mention waterboarding of detainees who, as admitted by US intelligence officials, if they're at most Iraqi prisons stand upwards of a 90% chance of being innocent civilians?
You also expressed the view that you were not given adequate time to respond to our accusations. But your had 20 minutes to respond, this after 10 minutes to start off the event. Yet instead of answering even one of the numerous accusations against you, you merely described them as unfounded, criticized my "pulling quotes out of context and stringing them together," and focused your comments—which you repeated verbatim in your lecture later that evening—on the argument that since al-Qa'eda and other terrorist groups were non-state actors the Geneva Conventions don't apply to them. That may well be, but this was the one issue that your co-panelists, and especially myself, specifically said did not concern us. As you might remember, the reason we didn't consider this the most important thing about which to debate is because even if your logic is valid and the detainees don't fit post-World War II legal categories, their definitional ambiguity can in no way justify US government-approved abuses and even crimes against them. Does it? (Of course, you might have mentioned that as a signatory to Geneva, the US can't decide to suspend applying its provisions without formally withdrawing from the conventions. And therefore, before detainees are declared unlawful combatants, they would have to be put before a special tribunal where an independent judge would determine their status. This has yet to occur with any detainee in the war on terror).
Of course, I especially like this paragraph (empasis added):
Both of your rationales for justifying such treatment revolve around a utilitarian argument based on a cost benefits analysis that asks whether the harm done to a (let us remember, a quite possibly innocent) detainee from the interrogation is equal to or greater to the potential harm that would occur if a terrorist attack, especially one involving, WMD, occurred. Among the many problems of this logic—
and see Jack Rabbit's http://www.democraticunderground.com/articles/04/03/11_torture.html">Why Torture Doesn't Work: A Critique of Alan Dershowitz' Case for Torture for a thorough critique of Dershowitz's argument—the most important is that there is little if any evidence that torture reliably produces accurate and timely intelligence information. In fact, the Army Field Manual 34-52 states, "Experience indicates that the use of prohibited techniques is not necessary to gain the cooperation of interrogation sources. Use of torture and other illegal methods is a poor technique that yields unreliable results, may damage subsequent collection efforts, and can induce the source to say what he thinks the interrogator wants to hear." Moreover, the use of coercive techniques, one authorized on even a few detainees, always becomes widespread. As Douglas Johnson, of the Centre for Victims of Torture, explains, "Torture has always been justified by reference to a small number of people who know about the 'ticking time bomb' but in practice it has always been extended to a much wider population." Military investigators found this is indeed what happened at Abu Ghraib.
Again, I'd like to thank Professor LeVine for his kind words.
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