from New York
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 interrogator must
kill the person or cause organ failure or permanent loss of significant
body functions in order to constitute torture; 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. Yoo said self-defense or necessity could be used as a defense
to war crimes prosecutions for torture, notwithstanding the Torture
Convention’s absolute prohibition against torture in all circumstances,
even in wartime. This memo and another Yoo wrote with Jay Bybee in August
2002 provided the basis for the Administration’s torture of prisoners.
“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.