Time & Perspective Quote by John Yoo

Legalism is doing the dirty work here. Yoo’s sentence is built to sound like a reluctant concession to necessity: “Nonetheless” signals sobriety, “makes clear” claims inevitability, and “permits” shifts responsibility from the speaker to the Geneva Convention itself. The syntax buries the human being under conditional clauses until the endpoint feels pre-authorized: a civilian “not a member of the armed forces” can still be treated, functionally, like an enemy combatant if the state says he “has engaged” in attacks. That phrase is doing enormous, quiet labor. It doesn’t say convicted, proved, or even reliably identified. It says engaged.

The specific intent is to carve a legal pathway from civilian status to “more coercive interrogation approaches” by reframing the civilian as an ongoing threat. The moral argument is smuggled in as prevention: coercion isn’t punishment, it’s future-oriented risk management. That’s the post-9/11 move in miniature, where imminence and uncertainty become reasons to expand state power rather than to restrain it.

Subtext: the Geneva Convention is not a brake but a toolbox. Yoo’s framing treats international law as a set of permissions to be exploited at the margins, not a regime designed to protect the vulnerable precisely when fear is highest. Context matters: written in the era when “enhanced interrogation” was being laundered through memos and footnotes, the line reads like a bid to make coercion sound not exceptional but administratively routine, the kind of thing a conscientious bureaucracy might do after checking the right article. That’s what makes it effective - and unsettling.