John Yoo War Criminal, Author of Bush's Torture Memos and UC Berkeley Law Professor
Revolution #020, October 30, 2005, posted at revcom.us
A former law clerk to Clarence Thomas and a member of the right-wing Federalist Society, John Yoo was among a group of Bush administration lawyers—including Alberto Gonzales, now Bush's attorney general—who crafted legal justification giving Bush a free hand to order the torture of those he has declared as “illegal combatants” and held at Guantanamo and elsewhere
According to the PBS documentary "The Torture Question," after 9/11, John Yoo
“wrote the first draft of a sweeping war powers authorization designed to give President Bush unprecedented power... The new statute would vest virtually unlimited power in the President to fight the war on terror. Congress passed it overwhelmingly.”
The following quotes by Yoo are from New Yorker magazine (“Outsourcing Torture” by Jane Mayer):
"There is a category of behavior not covered by the legal system ...If you were an illegal combatant, you didn’t deserve the protection of the laws of war... They were tried in a military court, and executed"
Congress has no power to "tie the President’s hands in regard to torture as an interrogation technique."
"It’s the core of the Commander-in-Chief function. They can’t prevent the President from ordering torture."