Stump the Yoo!

From the studios of Amygdala, as seen on Pharyngula and The Sideshow, it is America's new hit game show Stump the Yoo!

You see, torture memo author John Yoo has had some trouble answering straightforward questions about presidential power. John Conyers of the House Judiciary Committee asked him

"Is there anything, Professor Yoo, that the president could not order to be done to a suspect, if he believed it necessary for national defense?...Could the president order a suspect buried alive?"

Yoo couldn't come up with a straight answer.

Yoo has trouble with questions like this all the time. When he does give a straight answer, it is pretty alarming. Law Professor Doug Cassel asked

"If the President deems that he’s got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person’s child, there is no law that can stop him?"

The answer? Well no treaty stops him, and US law might not stop him, depending on what his reasons for ordering a child's testicles crushed were.

So Amygdala's Gary Farber has issued a challenge: What other tricky questions can we use to flummox John Yoo. Farber's entry:

Can the president order the arms of a suspect eaten by wolves while still attached?

Pharyngula suggests:

"Can the president order a suspect to be impaled for his lunchtime entertainment?"

The Sideshow:

"Is there anything Hitler did that a president of the United States can't do?"

Pharyngula's commentators

• Can a president order a person to eat his own foot?
• Can the President order a person to shoot a man in Reno just to watch him die?
• Could the president order you, Mr. Yoo, to be renditioned to Saudi Arabia to be interrogated, then decapitated? And if not, why not?
• Can a president have a man's hands removed and surgically replaced with the tentacles of an octopus just to see what would happen?
• Could the president order me to turn myself inside-out?
• Could the president order that the suspect must travel in time to save Lincoln?
• Could the President make you, John Yoo, answer my questions with a simple "Yes" or "No" response?
• Can the president order a suspect to eat a booger sandwich?

These are really fun. When Boredom Strikes asks if the president can order someone be drowned in Splenda? My contribution:

Can the President order his enemies to be crushed and driven before him so he may hear the lamentations of their women?

I think people who take Yoo's constitutional law class should ask him questions like these after every lecture.