Success Quote by John Yoo

Yoo’s sentence is doing lawyerly alchemy: it converts a messy political and moral question into a neat compliance checklist, then uses that checklist to justify a dramatic downgrade in human status. The phrasing “had an initial claim” concedes the Geneva framework just long enough to appear restrained, before the pivot - “they lost POW status” - lands like an administrative consequence rather than a contested choice. That’s the specific intent: to normalize an interpretation in which protections are conditional, revocable, and ultimately controlled by the detaining power.

The subtext is power dressed up as neutrality. By foregrounding “uniforms,” “responsible command,” and “obeying the laws of war,” Yoo invokes the traditional markers of state armies, then treats non-state warfare as a kind of disqualifying disorder. It’s a rhetorical move that makes asymmetry itself sound like illegality. “Standards of conduct for legal combatants” quietly smuggles in the idea that only certain forms of fighting count as real war - and therefore only certain fighters count as legitimate recipients of rights.

Context matters: Yoo was a central legal architect of the post-9/11 national security state, writing in an environment where the U.S. sought maximum flexibility for detention and interrogation. This line advances that project by reframing Geneva not as a floor of humane treatment but as a membership benefit you can forfeit. The danger isn’t just semantic. Once “status” becomes something you can lose through broad, contestable criteria, the law becomes a tool for exception-making - and “exception” becomes policy.