After last week's decision by the Justice Department to close its investigation into the work that he and other Bush administration lawyers did on the so-called torture memos, John Yoo feels vindicated, he told NPR today.
On Talk of the Nation, Yoo told host Neal Conan that "the Justice Department ... reached the right outcome in the end" — though he disagrees with the internal review's conclusion that he and his colleagues showed "poor judgment" when they offered legal advice that authorized the use of waterboarding on some terrorism suspects.
"Lawyers argue about things all the time," Yoo said. "We're talking about some of the hardest questions that any government lawyer could face. ... If poor judgment was the strongest term that Supreme Court justices used, the opinions would be a lot shorter."
Here's a bit of their conversation, starting with Neal:
The entire interview, as well as related conversations with NPR justice correspondent Ari Shapiro and Jameel Jaffer of the ACLU National Security Project, will be posted here later.
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