Daily Inspiration Quote by John Yoo

A lawyer’s wink dressed up as a disclaimer, John Yoo’s line performs the oldest trick in bureaucratic rhetoric: insist on the rule while quietly carving out the escape hatch. “This is not to condone” is prophylactic language, less a moral stance than an effort to launder what follows through a veneer of legality. It signals awareness of a bright-line taboo, then immediately shifts the reader’s attention from ethics to compliance optics: the relevant question becomes not what torture is, but how narrowly it can be defined so the state can do what it wants without “condoning” it.

The subtext is procedural innocence. By foregrounding the Torture Convention and federal criminal law, Yoo invokes the authority of the very prohibitions his broader memo culture was accused of undermining. That move matters because it aims at two audiences at once: internal policymakers who need rhetorical cover and external overseers who might later read the paper trail. The sentence is a time capsule of the post-9/11 legal project: translate moral catastrophe into statutory interpretation, then treat the translation as exculpatory.

Context does the heavy lifting. Yoo, as an Office of Legal Counsel figure during the Bush administration, wrote opinions that notoriously narrowed “torture” and expanded executive power. Read against that backdrop, the sentence functions like a legal seatbelt. It anticipates condemnation, then tries to preempt it: we didn’t endorse illegality, we merely explored the boundaries. The genius, and the danger, is that it sounds responsible while training the system to treat cruelty as a definitional problem.