Politics

In Berkeley, Yoo feels at home as a stranger in a strange land

interns Contributor
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The former Bush administration lawyer who drafted what his critics call the “torture memos” is reviled by many in this liberal East Bay academic enclave, a feeling that is mutual though not, Yoo insists, wholly unpleasant.

“I think of myself as being West Berlin during the Cold War, a shining beacon of capitalism and democracy surrounded by a sea of Marxism,” Yoo observes, sipping iced tea in the faculty club lounge, a wan smile registering the discomfort of colleagues walking by en route to the bar.

He sees his neighbors as the human figures of “a natural history museum of the 1960s,” the Telegraph Avenue tableau of a graying, long-haired, pot-smoking counterculture stuck in the ideology’s half-century-old heyday.

“It’s like looking at the panoramic displays of troglodytes sitting around the campfire with their clubs. Here, it’s tie-dye and marijuana. It’s just like the 1960s, with the Vietnam War still to protest.”

Yoo, 42, is unrepentant about his role in providing the CIA and other agencies with legal cover to conduct harsh interrogation of terror suspects with techniques such as water-boarding, which simulates drowning. In legal guidance he provided to the past administration, Yoo redefined torture as pain resulting in organ failure or death.

Full story: In Berkeley, Yoo feels at home as a stranger in a strange land – latimes.com