John Yoo to tout book at SF appearance
By Josh Richman
Wednesday, January 20th, 2010 at 5:18 pm in Civil liberties, War on Terror.
If those activists who’ve dogged Cal law professor John Yoo – who as a Justice Department lawyer helped build a legal framework for the “enhanced interrogation” techniques many now consider to be torture and for other perceived Bush Administration transgressions – still can’t find where he’s teaching his current class, at least they’ll know where he is for a few hours next week.
Yoo will speak to the Commonwealth Club of California about his new book, “Crisis and Command: A History of Executive Power from George Washington to George W. Bush,” at 6 p.m. next Wednesday, Jan. 27 at the club’s offices on the second floor of 595 Market St. in San Francisco. Tickets are available online and cost $12 for club members, $18 for nonmembers and $7 for students with valid ID; I predict the tickets will sell out and – no, really, I’m a little bit psychic – that the club’s security will be expecting protestors to try to disrupt the event.
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January 21st, 2010 at 3:04 am
Josh, Yoo’s classroom has been located, and yes, activists will be back on the scene when he actually returns from his book tour and attempts to teach.
Meanwhile, CAL has granted him a SECOND secret class, posting NO information on size, time or location. Special treatment for war criminals… is this what “academic freedom” is all about?
Curt Wechsler
the world can’t wait – Fire John Yoo!
January 25th, 2010 at 4:19 pm
The Rest of the World can’t wait for the left-wingnut post-mortem of the Bush years to end. Let historians argue about the mistakes and achievements after the facts are collected. America has enough to ponder without nonstop second-guessing of the departed administration.
March 1st, 2012 at 12:26 pm
HE’S BACK…
Thursday, March 15, 2012
Same time, same location
http://tinyurl.com/86mtwgh
Torture Professor sets sights on Iran
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
It is time for Berkeley Law to come
clean and fess up to what it actually represents, its “face” to the world, before the
nickname of “UC Law School for the Legal Justification of Torture” takes
permanent hold. Join us today in our campaign to “Fire, Disbar, and Prosecute
John Yoo.”