"...It was primarily a separation-of-powers concern that fueled the inter-branch drama of 2004 to 2008, during which a shrinking majority, over increasingly sharp dissents, pushed back against the Bush administration and Congress to assert the court's own institutional authority. -- Linda Greenhouse, Yale Law School professor and commentator for The New York Times
Hell NO! President Obama's attempt to sweep the "mess" of Guantanamo under the carpet only serves to exemplify his culpability in obstruction of justice for crimes of the Bush regime.
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The European Court of Human Rights, based in Strasbourg, France, held a Grand Chamber hearing in the case El-Masri v. "The former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia" on May 16, 2012.
This represents the first case to come before the court against a European nation for complicity in the CIA's "extraordinary rendition" program.
see Victim of Torture Gets His First Day in Court
Mr Masri's case is still pending at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.
All claim to be protected by the "golden shield" offered by
their inside man, John Yoo, part of a group of lawyers who aggressively pushed
the lawlessness of the "war on terror." Abusing his position as a lawyer in the
Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, whose mandate is to provide
impartial legal advice to the executive branch, Yoo instead attempted to
redefine torture and approved its use -- including the use of waterboarding, an
ancient torture technique and a form of controlled drowning -- on an alleged "high-value
detainee," Abu Zubaydah, in two memos, dated August 1, 2002, that will forever
be known as the "torture memos"...
see Andy Worthington's Bush Administration on Trial
names of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Gonzales, Yoo, Bybee, Addington and Haynes to be entered and included in the Kuala Lampur War Crimes Commission's Register for public record
By now everyone at Boalt knows exactly what the orange ribbon means. Constant
protest, agitation and education everywhere Yoo goes have made it clear:
"No Torture In My Name."
More photos here... thanks Ashley!
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Over the past few weeks we have witnessed a resurgence of
argument by Bush administration pundits that torture "works" to keep Americans safe. To attempt to justify use of this universally prohibited practice in the
interest of national security is a legal and moral travesty, as unconscionable
as the brutality inflicted upon those captured.
Torture is inhumane and immoral...period. Why is one of the central perpetrators of a systematic torture program (still) teaching at Boalt Hall?
]]>Many know the name of John Yoo, but most do not know his full role in the criminal enterprise known as the Bush Regime
Yoo is infamous for his 81-page "torture memo" written while he was a Department of Justice lawyer, on a two-year leave from the UC Berkeley Law faculty. He is one of the many Bush administration attorneys who provided legal justification and cover for the illegal actions of the Bush administration during its eight years in power, including the lies prefacing the immoral and illegitimate war on Iraq. Today, John Yoo continues to promote the ultimate war crime: the invasion of another country posing no imminent threat to the security of the U.S. He is calling on Republican presidential candidates to prepare the case for a military strike to destroy Iran's nuclear program. And now, not content with U.S. global supremacy, Yoo has raised his sights to the heavens, advocating for U.S. militarization of space.
No immunity for war crimes
Last week a Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals panel dismissed a case against John Yoo (Padilla v. Yoo) that alleged the defendant's "torture memos" provided the legal groundwork for the plaintiff's detention and "gross physical and psychological abuse." Shielding former Office of Legal Council Attorney Yoo with selective immunity - while acknowledging that the plaintiff's charges rise to the level of torture - the court's ruling exposes the reality of a corrupt system that protects a political elite who commit radical, far-reaching crimes of the highest order from prosecution or punishment.
The institutional complicity in torture exhibited by federal judges in the Padilla case is shared by the University of California, as long as UC keeps John Yoo on the Boalt faculty. In effect UC is tolerating Yoo's unprofessional, unethical, and criminal recent past as a hired gun lawyer for a White House that needed legal cover for illegal torture. A lawyer who enabled Bush and Cheney to break the law is being allowed to serve as a teacher and role model to future lawyers and judges.
Crimes are crimes, no matter who does them
UC Berkeley's official defense of John Yoo appears to have
been delegated to Law School Dean Christopher Edley (Chancellor Birgeneau fails
to register any concern over torture). Dean Edley misapplies the principle of
"academic freedom" to protect John Yoo, despite repeated rebuttals from
numerous constitutional lawyers and other experts who correctly understand that
unethical, criminal and immoral action in the service of government are not
protected. Edley's secondary defense, that Yoo is popular with students, is an
almost laughable basis for evaluation.
When torture apologists search for justification of the
crackpot theories of John Yoo on torture, rendition, and his radical theory of
the imperial executive, it is cause for alarm. Yoo's Office of Legal Counsel
opinions were treated as legally binding - for a short time. While his opinions
have been soundly rejected, and revoked (President Obama went so far as to
forbid agents of the government to rely on any interpretation of interrogation
law issued by the Department of Justice between September 11, 2001 and January
20, 2009) it is disingenuous for the Ninth Circuit judges in the Padilla v. Yoo
suit to argue that law governing the treatment of "enemy combatants" and the
definition of torture was unsettled at the time Yoo penned his memos. One has
only to look at the Nuremberg Trials after World War II, especially the case
U.S. v. Altstoetter, to find conviction of Nazi judges, prosecutors, and
Ministry of Justice officials whose "legal" work enabled the Nazis to carry out
the Holocaust under color of law.
Starting w/ student actions in 2004, when graduates wore red armbands to protest the recently disclosed "torture memos" authored by John Yoo, they have challenged the presence of a war criminal on their faculty. Yet despite numerous letter and petition campaigns to investigate professional misconduct, community vigils in support of torture victims, even a City Council resolution to prosecute the professor for war crimes, school administrators have not only refused to investigate Yoo's performance but have actually promoted his discredited work.
Some Boalt students do "get it" - and have refused to study constitutional law under Yoo. But it doesn't take a law degree to know that waterboarding is torture, that crushing the testicles of a detainee's child to break the prisoner's will is morally reprehensible, that holding prisoners indefinitely without charge defies a 700 year tradition of habeas corpus. Or that the design of the framers of the U.S. Constitution was not to replicate the British government's allocation of powers between Parliament and the King.
Meanwhile, the Boalt faculty has remained shamefully silent, failing to challenge Yoo as a shoddy thinker and bad lawyer. His torture memos, his books, his latest statements share one common theme: The outcome justifies the law. It is the rule of expediency, the rule of might. He does not apply fundamental principles to circumstances, but applies circumstances to change principles. None of Yoo's arguments are focused on the traditional goals of law, protecting liberty, expanding democracy, ensuring the rights of the vulnerable and endangered, restraining the abuse of the powerful. Instead, he argues to expand the power of an already imperious President, to curtail restraints preventing abuse, to increase the role of power politics and to erode the constraints of the judiciary.
Allowing Yoo to teach law is an attack on scholarship and education
This whole structure - the lies, the disregard of facts, the phony reasoning, the inverted principles - is an attack on the basics of academic scholarship. "It is necessary to question the consequences of the use of torture on the principles and practices of scholarship and education. By either openly or passively condoning torture, for example through our silence, we send a devastating message not only to our students, but also to the community at large: that the prohibition against torture is negotiable or even dispensable. Especially in the humanities, where cutting edge thinking explores concepts and experiences such as 'responsibility', 'otherness', 'difference', 'memory', 'trauma', our work and research become entirely irrelevant if, today, we ignore the implications of a re-legitimization of torture."
Think about this:
Many people know the name of John Yoo, but most do not know his full role in the criminal enterprise known as the Bush Regime. Yoo is associated with the infamous 81-page "torture memo" written while he was a Department of Justice lawyer, on a two-year leave from the UC Berkeley Law faculty. He is one of the many Bush administration attorneys who provided legal justification and cover for the illegal actions of the Bush regime during its eight years in power, including the lies prefacing the immoral and illegitimate war on Iraq.
Well guess what, no surprise, John Yoo is at it again, promoting an exaggeration of Iran's nuclear capabilities and agitating for U.S. military action against Iran.
"It's amazing how lies grow. You start with a small one that seems easy to cover, then you get boxed in and tell another one. Then another. People believe you at first, and then act upon your lies, and you catch yourself wishing you'd simply told the truth." - 'The Client' by John Grisham
The University of California's advocacy for the current U.S. Torture State began with a rather banal defense of its employee John Yoo, whose conduct and work at the Bush/Cheney Justice Department fell far outside established ethical standards. Berkeley Law Dean Christopher Edley sticks with his misapplication of the principle of "academic freedom" to provide safe harbor to his subordinate, despite repeated rebuttals from those, including numerous constitutional lawyers, who correctly understand that unethical, criminal and immoral action in the service of government are not protected.
Dean Edley taught Barack Obama at Yale and provided consultation services for his presidential campaign, and has upheld the President's decision to avoid investigation of criminal actions of the Bush administration. But political calculation must not be the basis for decisions involving the most basic principles of universal human rights. World Can't Wait urges people of conscience to reject the pretext of Fear being sold to the American public and to repudiate the illegal practices being used in the global "war" on terror.
]]> Christopher Edley (or John Yoo for that matter) is not solely responsible for the disgraceful enablement of torture advocacy at Boalt Hall. For far too long, academe (and other schools employ war criminals, see warcriminalswatch.org) has neglected its responsibility -- to pursue and explore truth. And it's been this failure that has led to an impasse in closing the most ignominious example of U.S. cruelty, Guantanamo Bay.
The above is a legacy that must be undone. But in the absence of accountability for past crimes, we have allowed an escalation in what amounts to a U.S. war OF terror: the state-sponsored torture and terrorizing of whole populations (think Afghanistan and Iraq, think Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and Bagram). And because Dean Edley, Chancellor Birgeneau ("We're actually a fairly broad church here... we've got the law professor John Yoo, who has been a prime advocate of the U.S. government's torture policy"), administrators, professional associations and yes, faculty, practitioners and alumni have been remiss in ignoring their purported ethical obligations, the entire UC community finds itself in the predicament of watching someone whose veneer of legitimacy should have been stripped away years ago, promoting the ultimate war crime, the invasion of another country which is not an imminent threat to the security of the U.S., in this particular case the sovereign state of Iran, writing in the National Review:
"[current Republican presidential candidates] must begin preparing the case for a military strike to destroy Iran's nuclear program..." - John Yoo
We continue to expose the history of our government's crimes. And recognize Berkeley Law's complicity in continuance of U.S. torture policy specifically. Say NO! to employment of war criminals and justification for war crimes. Join us in our campaign to "Fire, Disbar, and Prosecute John Yoo."
]]>"this is the reality of the country we live in: those in elite political and intellectual circles exist in a special bubble where they can commit radical, far-reaching crimes of the highest order and never be subject to prosecution or punishment. The rest of us poor saps are lorded over by this law...
Routine
Exoneration for Government Criminals
Even the New York
Times finds Wednesday's decision by Ninth Circuit judges to grant immunity to torture advocate John Yoo "misguided and dangerous" and finds the ruling based on "an unworkable standard."
in unsettling example of
moral turpitude, judges pass the buck:
Today, the 9th Circuit Court, of which Jay Bybee is a member, ruled that Yoo is protected from the lawsuit, claiming that the law defining torture and the treatment of enemy combatants was unsettled when Yoo wrote the memos...
Ninth Circuit Court harbors war criminal, protects his coconspirator
More on judicial abdication of responsibility, c/o Glenn Greenwald, here."I am deeply disturbed that you have chosen to give a platform to ex-CIA director Jose Rodriguez to defend the practice of water boarding and the destruction of 92 videos in which this torture practice is used. While it is your right to have this individual on your show I'd like to point out that the record of the mainstream covering the stories of those who have endured torture and indefinite detention has been sorely lacking. For example a large number of the American public has been kept from the fact that the torture and indefinite detention of many under the Global War On Terrorism was done so under erroneous and suspect circumstances. Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell stated that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld all knew that most of those detained were innocent. Wilkerson is quoted as saying, "more and more clear many of the men were innocent, or at a minimum their guilt was impossible to determine let alone prove in any court of law, civilian or military." . And yet nearly 200 remain in Guantanamo and over 2000 in Bagram under the Obama Presidency.
That the debate over torture is reduced to whether it works or not with regard to national security is a travesty and is as unconscionable as the torture and indefinite detention inflicted upon those captured. It is inhumane and immoral...period. Furthermore I should hope you would ask Jose Rodriguez that if there was nothing wrong with water boarding then why feel compelled to destroy the 92 videos? I shall also hope that in the near future you choose to interview those who have been detained and tortured.
Sincerely,
Jill McLaughlin, World Can't Wait National Steering Committee
The so-called "debate" about whether torture helped to keep us safe is reemerging... Washington's Blog quotes top military and intelligence interrogation experts who posit that not only does torture not "work" in terms of providing truthful information, torture has been continuing under President Obama.
see No Defending the Indefensible
The time has come to finally say loud and clear: the same
things that were crimes under Bush are crimes under Obama. Outrages under Bush
are outrages under Obama. All this
MUST STOP. And all this MUST BE
RESISTED by anyone who claims a shred of conscience or integrity...