John Yoo (Photo credit: commonwealth.club)
Of course, John Yoo has a right to speak in support of torture. Of course, students should be allowed to listen — or not — to his arguments and make up their own minds.
But a university should not be honoring a torture architect with an endowed faculty chair. But that’s exactly what Boalt Law School at the University of California announced last month.
As a refresher, Yoo was in the Department of Justice under President George W. Bush when he wrote a series of memorandums arguing that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to detainees from the war in Afghanistan. Essentially, that meant that US forces “disappeared” detainees in secret black sites around the world, where they were subjected to vicious torture that sometimes led to their deaths. A number of those detainees were completely innocent — wrong place, wrong time. Since, the US government has refused to allow their law suits for damages in courts, arguing that coming clean about this shameful record would risk national security.
That’s hogwash, just as it’s hogwash for the California regents to argue one of the minds that drove our country onto the dark side (to quote former Vice President Dick Cheney).
The San Francisco Chapter of the National Lawyer’s Guild has started a petition campaign to the law school dean to revoke his decision. The petition notes:
by maintaining and honoring John Yoo, the law school is undermining its own ethical, political, and legal reputation. Bestowing this honor sends the message that the UC Berkeley School of Law is condoning and promoting policies violating the most fundamental constitutional and human rights.
You can sign it here, as I have.
To hear what it was like for detainees, listen to this BBC report on Saad Iqbal Madni, an innocent Pakistani who was released after five years of illegal imprisonment.
