John Yoo told Justice Department ethics investigators he forgot he had approved waterboarding as a CIA interrogation technique.
Yoo was the principal author of the legal memo that authorized waterboarding and other coercive techniques, such as cramped confinement. In an interview with Justice Department lawyers investigating him for possible professional misconduct, Yoo revealed that he “had actually thought that we prohibited waterboarding,” according to the report by the Office of Professional Responsibility released on Friday. (OPR Final Report, PDF pgs. 59-60)
Yoo, now a law professor, was a Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Legal Counsel when the memo was issued to the CIA in August 2002. A month before, Yoo had given the CIA license to use six other techniques — attention grasp, walling, facial hold, facial slap, cramped confinement and wall standing — on Abu Zubaydah.
He told investigators that those techniques ”did not even come close to the [legal] standard [of torture],” but that “waterboarding did.” (Another technique, which is blacked out in the OPR report, also gave the Justice Department pause. In an earlier version of the OPR report, Yoo is said to have told the CIA that the department would need more time to discern whether “mock burial” violated the torture statute. The tactic was not approved; Yoo told investigators he had concluded that it was illegal before he asked for more time. First Draft Report, PDF pg. 178)
Waterboarding was apparently close enough to the line that Yoo’s memory was murky. “I didn’t recollect that we had actually said that you could do it,” he told OPR investigators.
The difference between the clinical description of waterboarding and the press description of the method appears to have been a source of confusion.
“[T]he waterboarding as it’s described in the memo is very different than the waterboarding that was described in the press. And so when I read the description of what waterboarding is, I was like, oh, well obviously that would be prohibited by the statute,” Yoo said.
In other words, waterboarding sounds much worse in plain English.
