by the El Reportero’s staff
Protesters fake war prisoners being tortured in Iraq during a protest in UC campus.: (phot courtesy of WORLD CAN’T WAIT)
For the time being there will not be peace for John Yoo, as long as activists from World Can’t Wait, continue haunting the torture professor.
According to members for World Can’t Wait, they will not rest until Yoo is kicked out of his law-teaching job at UC Berkeley, a non-deserving position, for master minding the design of torturing tactics against Iraqi prisoners. They want the professor disbarred and prosecuted for war crimes as “the architect of the Bus-Cheney torture state.”
And to make sure that the debate over the recently released CIA Inspector General’s report from Dick Cheney and the halls of Congress to the radio talk shows, doesn’t die, The group, which has been protesting for several months, staged another protest on Sept. 3 to challenge UC’s employment of John Yoo, a former Bush administration lawyer.
According to Frances Tobin, who wrote Torture Memo’s John Yoo Welcomed Back to Berkeley by Protesters, in the online publication Politics Daily, the controversial memos he composed – the more infamous of which dealt with the curtailing of Geneva Conventions as applied to suspected Al-Qaida and Taliban leaders, narrowing the definition of torture, and justifi cations for warrantless wiretapping – were written during the time he served as a deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel at the U.S. Department of Justice, where, according to his university profi le, “he worked on issues involving foreign affairs, national security and the separation of powers.”
In August on the first day of classes at UC Berkeley Law, a press conference and protest drew over 60 people to the steps of Boalt Hall, where Yoo currently teaches Civil Procedures.
At that press conference, prominent lawyers and psychologists representing four generations of alumni of UC and its law schools denounced the presence of John Yoo on the UC faculty, announced World Can’t Wait.
Four protesters were arrested; including Stephanie Tang, a leader of World Can’t Wait. All were cited for two charges of trespassing and disturbing the peace, banned from the UC Berkeley Campus for seven days, and released.
In her article, Tobin cites the following responses to an email campaign launched against Yoo by American Freedom Campaign.
In response to the demands for Yoo’s firing — and some also think he should be disbarred — Edley released a statement in April of 2008. Edley cited Yoo’s First Amendment and due process protections, saying further, “My sense is that the vast majority of legal academics with a view of the matter disagree with substantial portions of Professor Yoo’s analyses, including a great many of his colleagues at Berkeley.
If, however, this strong consensus were enough to fi re or sanction someone, then academic freedom would be meaningless.”
According to a 2008 Inside Higher Ed article dealing with this topic, some within the academic legal realm supported Yoo even though they didn’t agree with his politics or positions. Brian Leiter, a professor of law and philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin, called the emails by American Freedom Campaign a “disgraceful attack on the academy,” claiming that “tenure, and academic freedom, would mean nothing if every professor with views deemed morally reprehensible or every professor who produced a shoddy piece of work — while inside or outside the academy — could be fired.”
In his 2008 statement, Dean Edley noted, “We press our students to grapple with these matters, and in the legal literature Professor Yoo and his critics do battle. One can oppose and even condemn an idea, but I do not believe that in a university we can fearfully refuse to look at it. That would not be the best way to educate, nor a promising way to seek deeper understanding in a world of continual, strange revolutions.” Edley suggested that the controversy could be a proverbial “teachable moment,” though it seems that then, as today, no consensus has emerged as to whether Boalt Hall has accurately assessed such a decision and its reverberating effect. (Politics Daily’s Frances Tobin and press announcements contributed to this article.
