EARL NASH, WTFG "TORTURED SOULS" Correspondent >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
“It’s news to you…” <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< John Yoo is a
Professor at UC Berkeley and has been awarded tenure. This gives him the privilege of academic
freedom to, essentially, behave as he chooses; to say what he wants and to believe
what he will. While he would have to
actually massacre a village of civilians himself to be fired by the University
of California, students can make him an extravagant budget item and render him irrelevant by
boycotting his classes. Just as a King
ceases to be a sovereign when he has no subjects, a professor ceases to be a
teacher without students. Professor Yoo's
moral stance on torture and the killing of civilians is protected by his
academic freedom, but he deserves to be "shrouded"--ignored by his
faculty colleagues and the students of U. C. Berkeley. He is a disgrace to the profession of
teaching and deserves to stand in his classroom before rows of empty seats. Professor Yoo, you
are a moral monster who gave legal license to Cheney and encouraged him to torture
prisoners of war. You and Cheney thus
gave license to the "enemy" to torture any U. S. soldiers that are
captured. Shame on you Mr.
Yoo; your karma awaits to cast you into the darkness and Divine justice will
surely torture your soul. XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
20
February 2010
The
chief author of the Bush administration's "torture memo" told Justice
Department investigators that the president's war-making authority was so broad
that he had the constitutional power to order a village to be
"massacred," according to a report by released Friday night by the
Office of Professional Responsibility.
The views of
former Justice lawyer John Yoo were deemed to be so extreme and out of step
with legal precedents that they prompted the Justice Department's internal
watchdog office to conclude last year that he committed "intentional
professional misconduct" when he advised the CIA it could proceed with
waterboarding and other aggressive interrogation techniques against Al Qaeda
suspects.
The report by OPR
concludes that Yoo, now a Berkeley law professor, and his boss at the time, Jay
Bybee, now a federal judge, should be referred to their state bar associations
for possible disciplinary proceedings.
But, as first reported by NEWSWEEK, another
senior department lawyer, David Margolis, reviewed the report and last month
overruled its findings on the grounds that there was no clear and
"unambiguous" standard by which OPR was judging the lawyers. Instead,
Margolis, who was the final decision-maker in the inquiry, found that they were
guilty of only "poor judgment."
The report, more
than four years in the making, is filled with new details into how a small
group of lawyers at the Justice Department, the CIA, and the White House
crafted the legal arguments that gave the green light to some of the most
controversial tactics in the Bush administration's war on terror. They also
describe how Bush administration officials were so worried about the prospect
that CIA officers might be criminally prosecuted for torture that one senior
official - Attorney General John Ashcroft - even suggested that President Bush
issue "advance pardons" for those engaging in waterboarding, a
proposal that he was quickly told was not possible.
At the core of the
legal arguments were the views of Yoo, strongly backed by David Addington, Vice
President Dick Cheney's legal counsel, that the president's wartime powers were
essentially unlimited and included the authority to override laws passed by
Congress, such as a statute banning the use of torture. Pressed on his views in
an interview with OPR investigators, Yoo was asked:
"What about
ordering a village of resistants to be massacred? ... Is that a power that the
president could legally -"
"Yeah,"
Yoo replied, according to a partial transcript included in the report.
"Although, let me say this: So, certainly, that would fall within the
commander-in-chief's power over tactical decisions."
"To order a
village of civilians to be [exterminated]?" the OPR investigator asked
again.
"Sure,"
said Yoo.
Yoo is depicted as
the driving force behind an Aug. 1, 2002, Justice Department memo that narrowly
defined torture and then added sections concluding that, in the end, it
essentially didn't matter what the fine print of the congressionally passed law
said: The president's authority superseded the law and CIA officers who might
later be accused of torture could also argue that were acting in "self
defense" in order to save American lives.
The original
torture memo was prompted by concerns by John Rizzo, the CIA's general counsel,
that the agency's officers might be criminally prosecuted if they proceeded
with waterboarding and other rough tactics in their interrogation of Abu
Zubaydah, an allegedly high-level Al Qaeda-linked operative who had been
captured in Pakistan and in the spring of 2002 was transferred to a CIA
"black site" prison in Thailand.
Rizzo wanted the Justice Department
to provide a blanket letter declining criminal prosecution, essentially
providing immunity for any action engaged in by CIA officers, a request that
Michael Chertoff, then chief of the Justice Department's criminal division,
refused to provide. It was at that point that Yoo began crafting his opinion,
the contents of which he actively reviewed with senior officials at the White
House. "Let's plan on going over [to the White House] at 3:30 to see some
other folks about the bad things opinion," he wrote in a July 12, 2002,
e-mail quoted in the OPR report.
The report
describes two meetings at the White House with then-chief counsel Alberto
Gonzales and "possibly Addington." (Addington refused to talk to the
OPR investigators but testified before Congress that he did in fact have at
least one meeting with Yoo in the summer of 2002 to discuss the contents of the
torture opinion.) After the second meeting, on July 16, 2002, Yoo began writing
new sections of his memo that included his controversial views on the
president's powers as commander in chief.
When one of his associates, Patrick
Philbin, questioned the inclusion of that section and suggested it be removed,
Yoo replied, "They want it in there," according to an account given
by Philbin to OPR investigators. Philbin said he didn't know who the
"they" was but assumed it was whoever it was that requested the
opinion (technically, that was the CIA, although, as the report makes clear,
the White House was also pressing for it).
Yoo provided
extensive comments to OPR defending his views of the president's war-making
authority and disputing OPR's take that he slanted them to accommodate the
White House. He did not immediately respond to NEWSWEEK'S request for comment
Friday night.
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