Jon Stewart: Terrorists May Talk if Forced to Watch His Yoo Interview
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Daily Show host Jon Stewart says his interview yesterday with former Justice Department official John Yoo was “pretty unsatisfying.”
Yoo, a tenured law professor at the University of California at Berkeley’s Boalt Hall, wrote legal memos for the Justice Department approving harsh interrogations of terrorism suspects. Yoo told Stewart it was his duty to answer the administration’s questions about executive power, and confessed he had never met President George W. Bush, Main Justice reports.
Yoo said the White House’s questions weren’t “something that anybody wants to go out and answer” but the country had been attacked and there were fears of another strike. “There’s a huge demand to get this kind of intelligence from the top leaders of al-Qaida,” he told Stewart.
At the end of the show, Stewart joked that terrorists should be forced to watch his interview with Yoo, according to Main Justice. “My guess is they’ll talk,” Stewart said.
Yoo also told the New York Times in an interview published last week that he had never met Bush or Vice President Cheney. “I have not gone hunting with him, which is probably a good thing for me,” Yoo joked.
After he left government, Yoo told the Times, he ended up at UC Berkeley’s law school because “it was the best school that I was able to get a job at. It’s not easy for a conservative to get a job in the academy in any field.”
Yoo went on the Daily Show to promote his new book, Crisis and Command. A Washington Post review calls the book “a vigorously argued and, in some ways, deeply unsettling account of the necessary superiority of the presidency in our constitutional scheme.”
