Which came first: memos or torture?

A Los Angeles Times opinion piece from a few weeks ago asks Which came first: memos or torture? about John Yoo activities in the administration.

"Yoo is now a tenured professor at UC Berkeley's Boalt Hall. Recently, the National Lawyers Guild launched a campaign to have him fired because of his role in the torture issue. This move has touched off a controversy, especially among legal academics concerned about tenure and academic freedom."

"But Yoo's account of how and why the torture memos were crafted may not hold up. Congress is preparing hearings into the subject, and they have invited Yoo to testify. International law scholar Philippe Sands and other writers have punched holes in Yoo's claims about the facts. It increasingly appears that the Bush interrogation program was already being used before Yoo was asked to write an opinion. He may therefore have provided after-the-fact legal cover. That would help explain why Yoo strained to take so many implausible positions in the memos...The question becomes, was Yoo giving his best effort at legal analysis, or was he attempting to protect the authors of the program from criminal investigation and prosecution?"

"According to Human Rights First, more than 100 people have died in U.S. detention in the war on terrorism. It documented 11 cases where the deaths resulted from coercive interrogation techniques, and others where there was at least some connection."

"Is it right to say that lawyers dispensing bad advice in memos face no liability for what happens when people act in reliance on them? At the end of World War II, the U.S. took a different view in one narrow area. When the legal advice had to do with the treatment of detainees in wartime, the U.S. argued, lawyers had to adhere closely to the law or face prosecution. In one case, two German Justice Ministry lawyers were charged and sentenced to 10 years in prison for giving advice that allowed the creation of a special internment system for suspected insurgents. Their advice was close to that dispensed by Yoo."