Tortured Logic: John Yoo’s “Torture Memos” and Lessons on the Absorptive Nature of Neoliberal Rhetoric

• In Event: Pedagogies of (Resistance to) Neoliberalism

Abstract

This paper examines the so-called “Torture Memos,” authored by Korean American attorney John Yoo for George W. Bush’s administration. In these infamous memos, Yoo argues that treatment of prisoners can be “cruel and inhumane” but “not torture.” He also constructs an elaborate argument that creates Guantanamo Bay as a state of exception from both Geneva Convention statutes and U.S. juridical intervention. This state of exception has been much researched and discussed, but in this paper, I turn my attention to Yoo’s use of legal precedent, military and state history, and logic in order to construct his argument. I argue that Yoo deploys logics borrowed from Asian American Studies traditions; in particular, his use of legal precedent to link U.S. military incursions in the Philippines, Japan, Vietnam, Korea, and then Afghanistan and Iraq mirrors attempts by Asian American Studies and other ethnic studies scholars to do the same. Similarly, Yoo uses complex notions of “inside” and “outside” national territory and belonging to structure Guantanamo Bay as simultaneously both inside and outside the domain of the U.S.; this argument not only resembles, but seemingly builds on arguments made by ethnic studies scholars about the racialized and geographically situated nature of national belonging.
Yoo, I suggest, learned these logics while attending Harvard University in the 1980s, at the height of the so-called “multicultural university.” I read the Torture Memos alongside his published undergraduate editorials in the Harvard Crimson and Harvard student handbooks and curriculum guidelines of the period to argue that, through his liberal arts education, Yoo was exposed to and gained familiarity with the core tropes of ethnic studies methods and assertions. His fluency in the logics and language of Asian American studies specifically, and ethnic studies broadly, allowed him to construct an argument that appeared to resonate with multicultural norms, i.e., a formally non-race inflected argument that did not efface the U.S.’s history of “unofficial” warfare.
Throughout, I argue that Yoo’s fluid adoption of ethnic studies paradigms for neoconservative uses can be instructive for those of us seeking to use those paradigms as foundations for dissent. That is, in an era in which white supremacist movements can use ostensibly multicultural arguments to cloak their racial ideologies as a “white identity movement,” social justice-focused scholars need to be wary of our arguments and language being rhetorically appropriated, disfigured, and turned against us. While “multiculturalism” as a hegemonic social formation may be at its end, its capacity for absorbing dissenting ideologies remains a useful technology of governance. Thus, it behooves American Studies and ethnic studies scholars to pay close attention to the mechanisms of that technology in order to cultivate dissent more effectively.

Author

• Emily Raymundo, Dartmouth College