John Yoo at Berkeley
John “Torture Memo” Yoo is a law professor at Boalt. We now find that he wrote this sort of jaw-dropping stuff:
“If a government defendant were to harm an enemy combatant during an interrogation in a manner that might arguably violate a criminal prohibition, he would be doing so in order to prevent further attacks on the United States by the al Qaeda terrorist network,” Yoo wrote. “In that case, we believe that he could argue that the executive branch’s constitutional authority to protect the nation from attack justified his actions.”
Interrogators who harmed a prisoner would be protected by a “national and international version of the right to self-defense,” Yoo wrote. He also articulated a definition of illegal conduct in interrogations — that it must “shock the conscience” — that the Bush administration advocated for years.
“Whether conduct is conscience-shocking turns in part on whether it is without any justification,” Yoo wrote, explaining, for example, that it would have to be inspired by malice or sadism before it could be prosecuted.
This man teaches law? I’m horrified to know that this kind of teaching can make its way into any student’s mind. But I’m also just genuinely curious to know what sort of questions he gets asked, and whether he feels as though he can teach the kids infinitely flexible, infinitely callous sophistry. I would love to sit in on his class. This is the banality of evil, right at Berkeley. California taxpayers: your tax dollars subsidize it.
Even better John Yoo apparently also said the 4th Amendment doesn’t apply if the govenment is engaged in a “domestic miltary operation”. I mean, I know these guys are hired and kept on retainer to basically find some legal basis for whatever the President wants, but, at what point do you just have to say “Nope, sorry, I can’t do this” when you’ve come up with some flim-flam that would let the government do whatever it wanted and then get to declare “Oops! No tag backs: Miltary Operation!”?
Comment by mrz — April 2, 2008 @ 1:25 pm
When a lawyer gives obviously bogus legal advice, he should suffer the consequences. It’s even worse when he gives obviously bogus legal advice to provide legal cover for what his bosses want to do. Both the boss and the lawyer should suffer. If soldiers torture people under cover of “a lawyer told me it was okay,” the soldier should suffer too.
Comment by slaniel — April 2, 2008 @ 2:24 pm
So, as I understand it (and I may be wrong), the office of the president usually keeps a lawyer on retainer that basically serves to figure out legal cover for what the president is doing because, at some point, somebody might bring a court case. This has been done for a while. However, I suspect that most of these in the past have been more along the lines of minor separation of power squabbles that wouldn’t be a big deal most of the time. So, in such cases, the lawyer is just doing constitutional CYA for the president. That is, they are basically serving their part in an adversarial system.
Where this administration crosses the line is that they are going waaay beyond the limits of what is reasonable. They aren’t just stretching the rules a little bit, they are patently breaking them, and so they’ve worn the legal cover so thin that it’s basically worthless. Again, at what point does a lawyer say “Ok, now we’re not serving our part in an adversarial process, we’re just providing flimsy cover for a wrong.”
Comment by mrz — April 3, 2008 @ 7:07 am