Letters to the Editor

      TORTURE LOGIC
      My son John Walker Lindh, a convert to Islam, was among the many innocent persons subjected to torture under the auspices of the legal memoranda and advice that John Yoo provided in his capacity as a government attorney. Accordingly, I read Martin Lasden's September cover story ["Mad About Yoo"] with keen interest and deep emotion.
      John Lindh was guilty of nothing other than being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Out of a misguided but innocent idealism, and without telling me or his mother, John had volunteered for military service with the Afghan army under the Taliban government, months before the 9/11 attacks. He was trapped behind the lines after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001, and he was lucky to escape with his life.
      Under orders from Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld (who directed interrogators to "take the gloves off"), my son was stripped naked by American soldiers, tied with painful restraints to a gurney, and left in an unheated metal shipping container on an American military base in the Afghan desert for three days and nights. John's bullet and shrapnel wounds were deliberately left untreated, even though medical personnel were available.
      Others suffered worse treatment than my son, but no rational person could deny the fact that he was tortured. This occurred even though the government had no basis for suspecting John of any sort of terrorist or criminal act.
      Like my son John, it appears the overwhelming majority of those who have been tortured and abused by the U.S. government have been innocent persons, people whom the government had no reasonable suspicion of being involved with terrorism or any other sort of crime.
      Professor Yoo should be ashamed of his involvement with this activity, but it appears he is not. Perhaps if Yoo's own son or brother had been tortured, he would feel differently.
      Frank Lindh
      San Francisco
     
      I need to contribute another voice to the discussion of the propriety of torture in the war against terror. As background, I am an intelligence officer and California attorney, who served four years as one of a very limited number of legal advisers to human intelligence collection officers employed by the Department of Defense.
      The voice I raise is not that of the legal scholar, nor the legal practitioner?it is the voice of the client. In the war on terror, my clients were not interested in the depth or breadth of legal argument, nor in the applicability of assorted statutes or treaties. Their question was as simple as it was troubling: Is this [proposed activity] legal? I have too many memories of post-9/11 collection operations with officers running staggering levels of personal risk to obtain the information we needed to prevent further attacks. Those officers have my deepest respect-and they are the ones for whom I attempt to speak, because their voices have not yet been acknowledged.
      The clients wanted?needed?"bright lines" to encompass their activities, because those activities are almost always conducted under stress and often include an elevated degree of physical risk. They don't have time to ponder the questions that delight attorneys, who have been trained to revel in ambiguity and uncertainty. The clients' very lives may depend on their ability to enter an area, meet with a contact, and then depart without detection. At best, they face an implacable enemy who will go to extreme lengths to achieve its ends?as we learned to our collective sorrow six years ago. Our intelligence collectors need the best guidance we, the legal world, can provide.
      If we leave the definition of what forms of intelligence collection are and are not acceptable in the hands of scholars divorced from the environment in which their opinions must be applied, we run the grave risk of destroying that which we so desperately try to defend. America, ultimately, is not a place?it is an assortment of ideals, expressed eloquently in the Declaration of Independence. Our national survival, ultimately, hinges not so much on defense of things or places as on defense of ideals. If we abandon those ideals, the places and things we defend fade to irrelevance.
      Our intelligence collectors deserve better guidance than the "anything short of death is fine" approach.
      Bruce MacKay
      Dumfries, Virginia
     
      It is surprising that in an article published in a legal journal about a legal document concerning constitutional issues, no mention is made of important underlying facts. The individuals about whom Professor Yoo wrote belong to a terrorist organization and do not carry weapons openly, wear uniforms, follow responsible command, or comply with the laws of war. Under these circumstances, the Geneva Conventions do not apply to them (even if they are citizens of a country that signed the conventions). There are no laws or treaties that provide these individuals with any rights at all.
      Joseph Golant
      Riverwoods, Illinois
     
      California Lawyer welcomes letters to the editor and publishes excerpts from as many as possible. Please include your phone number and city of residence. Write to us at 44 Montgomery St., Suite 250, San Francisco, CA 94104, fax 415/296-2482, or email letters_callaw@dailyjournal.com.
     

---