Still, in the run-up to a full-fledged Congressional battle in late September over U.S. incarceration and interrogation conduct that his memo touched off, Yoo remained a darling of the right, a philosopher and justifier behind both the cause and the effect. A message on his office wall from his former boss, ex-Attorney General John Ashcroft, praises Yoo: "We are stronger and safer because of you." Yoo clerked for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas; on display is a bobblehead of the late Chief Justice William Rehnquist. Yoo breaks off an interview to gossip with the Republican chief counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee, where ten years back he worked alongside a young lawyer named Ann Coulter, the self-described right-wing polemicist, author, and commentator. But the onetime Volvo-driving professor (he recently turned the vehicle in for an Infiniti) at America’s best-known liberal university, married to writer Elsa Arnett (the daughter of war correspondent Peter Arnett), also believes his colleagues had fallen short on an honest debate on whether America’s battle in a seething new world demands new reactions—namely, new forms of strategic violence—from our democracy.

His work has also been watered down since the memos became public, he believes, "forcing our agents in the field to work in a vacuum of generalizations." He may have watered himself down, too. Though he winces when reminded that Bush, following the Abu Ghraib revelations, said that we Americans "do not torture," Yoo himself now uses the euphemism "coercive interrogation" for a program that has reportedly included forcing prisoners to stand for hours in enforced positions, suffocation, and sleep deprivation.

He notes that, since the dawn of the Cold War, we have had extensive secret arms of government with few restrictions placed on them, while enacting sharper curbs on some civil liberties, such as background checks as a condition of employment, and plenty of ugly foreign adventures involving torture and assassination. We just did not talk about these much, he says, arguing that we should.

"Maybe during the Cold War we didn’t want to confront all this, because it was happening overseas," he says. But now, he points out, "national borders are starting to decline, money moves easily, individuals have much more power because of technology."

This reality is now a permanent part of our lives, he says, and the changes wrought in our world—the easy access to unimaginably powerful technologies (imagine bio-terror, easily engineered viruses, as the fire next time), will dominate the post-Bush years no matter who wins the 2008 election. He foresees a far more powerful presidency, too, as the country grapples with new realities.

"A really good question (in the 2008 presidential debates) would be whether the president can issue a preemptive attack on a nation supplying weapons to terrorists," he says, asking in nearly the same breath: "Do you need congressional permission to launch a preemptive attack on a terrorist group? Should the government mine data to look for things?"

The power Yoo argues that the president should have—the right to authorize interrogation and indefinite detention without trials — is in keeping with national tradition, he says, defying his many critics. These times are akin to "the nationalization of the U.S. 100 years ago, when railroads and big corporations made states less powerful," he insists, adding that "the response was more power to Washington, to the presidency, and it was argued over for 30 years." Now, globalization means that the nation itself has less control over its affairs. Therefore the president needs even more authority, he reasons.

His argument was at the heart of the heated congressional public debate Yoo has long advocated. The debated ended on September 28 with the Senate voting to grant the president more discretionary power in establishing interrogation techniques and allowing for military commissions to initiate government prosecutions of high-level detainees. The most contentious issue — whether to strip detainees of their constitutional right to challenge their detentions in court — was also upheld. The House quickly followed suit, awarding President Bush, and therefore John Yoo, a victory.

Still, he predicts that "there will be a lot of tension between secrecy and democracy ... there are going to be circumstances when we have to put pressure on people for information, and we will see what the American people want."

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