Enhanced Interpretation

Ackerman fisks Yoo's WSJ piece. So does Larisa Alexandrovna:

The real reason John Yoo wrote this foolish, inaccurate piece is in the hopes of gathering around him some support for his illegal actions.

I've been traveling and just caught up with it. According to Yoo, restoring the ancient ban on torture for prisoners means an end to all useful intelligence on al Qaeda:

Eliminating the Bush system will mean that we will get no more information from captured al Qaeda terrorists.

Is Yoo saying that the US has never gotten any useful intelligence from Jihadists without violating the baseline Geneva Conventions? I mean: it's torture or a touchy-feely seminar? Really. Just go read Matthew Alexander's book on how he successfully interrogated and broke Qaeda members in Iraq. It's called Western warfare and smart interrogation. And it served us extremely well for centuries before academically-cocooned goons like Yoo were brought in to give Cheney pseudo-legal cover for whatever he wanted.