From The Toronto Star
By Linda McQuaig

Does the president of the United States have the right to order a detainee buried alive?

Oddly, this grotesque question was posed at a U.S. Congressional hearing last week. Even odder was the answer – from John Yoo, former deputy assistant attorney general in the Bush administration, now a law professor at the University of California.

“I don’t think that I’ve ever given the advice that the president could bury somebody alive,” Yoo told a judiciary subcommittee hearing into detainee interrogations.

Well, I guess that’s comforting to know. But it was striking to watch Yoo evade answering whether he considered there was any treatment so vicious and inhuman that it would be beyond the president’s power to inflict it on a detainee, in the interests of national defence.

Apparently there isn’t. In a public debate in 2005, Yoo was asked if he thought it would be lawful for the president to authorize crushing the testicles of a detainee’s child.

It would seem like a simple “no” would suffice. But here’s how Yoo responded: “I think it depends on why the president thinks he needs to do that.”

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