NATIONAL
LAWYERS GUILD CALLS ON BOALT HALL TO DISMISS LAW PROFESSOR JOHN YOO,
WHOSE TORTURE MEMOS LED TO COMMISSION OF WAR CRIMES
In a memorandum written the same month George W. Bush invaded Iraq,
Boalt Hall law professor John Yoo said the Department of Justice would
construe US criminal laws not to apply to the President’s detention and
interrogation of enemy combatants. According to Yoo, the federal
statutes against torture, assault, maiming and stalking do not apply to
the military in the conduct of the war.
The federal maiming
statute, for example, makes it a crime for someone “with the intent to
torture, maim, or disfigure” to “cut, bite, or slit the nose, ear or
lip, or cut out or disable the tongue, or put out or destroy an eye, or
cut off or disable a limb or any member of another person.” It further
prohibits individuals from “throwing or pouring upon another person any
scalding water, corrosive acid, or caustic substance” with like intent.
Yoo
also narrowed the definition of torture so the victim must experience
intense pain or suffering equivalent to pain associated with serious
physical injury so severe that death, organ failure or permanent damage
resulting in loss of significant body functions will likely result;
Yoo’s definition contravenes the definition in the Convention Against
Torture, a treaty the US has ratified which is thus part of the US law
under the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause.
“John Yoo’s
complicity in establishing the policy that led to the torture of
prisoners constitutes a war crime under the US War Crimes Act,” said
National Lawyers Guild President Marjorie Cohn.
Congress should repeal the provision of the Military Commissions Act
that would give Yoo immunity from prosecution for torture committed
from September 11, 2001 to December 30, 2005. John Yoo should be
disbarred and he should not be retained as a professor of law at one of
the country’s premier law schools. John Yoo should be dismissed from
Boalt Hall and tried as a war criminal.
The
National Lawyers Guild was founded in 1937 as an alternative to the
American Bar Association, which did not admit people of color, the
National Lawyers Guild is the oldest and largest public interest/human
rights bar organization in the United States. Its headquarters are in
New York and it has chapters in every state.
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