Around 200 orange-clad people came to the UC Berkeley Boalt Law School
graduation to call for “torture professor” John Yoo to be fired,
disbarred, and put on trial for war crimes. As thousands of friends and
family members of graduates, and then Dean Edley and the graduates
themselves, filed into the stadium, World Can’t Wait, National Lawyer’s
Guild members, Act Against Torture, and many others called on them to
wear orange and take a stand on this important occasion — not only
against torture, but against the normalization and acceptance of war
criminals on a supposedly liberal campus.
Our protest was very powerful visually. Act Against Torture brought a cage with two orange jump-suited Guantanamo prisoners inside guarded by an “armed” guard with a fake gun. World Can’t Wait brought a bunch of enlarged photos of torture from Abu-Ghraib. We also had a very creative new protest device: giant displays mounted on backpacks with messages about why John Yoo should be fired. But probably the most dramatic display of opposition to John Yoo came in the form of a plane that flew over the graduation for about 15 minutes bearing a banner that said, “Shame on Yoo, UC Berkeley End Torture,” paid for by a “concerned citizen” and UC Berkeley alum. Inside the graduation, two UC students unfurled a banner calling for Yoo to be fired.
The responses from students and family varied. A small number of older attendees said they liked torture — some serious, some joking. Some students told us John Yoo is a “good professor” and a “nice guy.” Some yelled at us about John Yoo’s
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| photo album of the Saturday Demo at the UC graduation |
“free speech” and “academic freedom.” Some progressive students who basically agreed with us were genuinely concerned about the “double edged sword” effect that firing John Yoo could potentially have — the way in which it could open the door to more witch-hunts of leftist professors. Some students and families didn’t like the fact that we would protest at a graduation: “It’s their day to celebrate!” On the other hand, we got many positive responses from students and families. By the end of the day about 5% of the students and 10% of the families were wearing orange ribbons. We called on the students to use this opportunity to go out into the world and right a terrible wrong, to take their degree and use it to prosecute John Yoo for war crimes!
-Torture protests at UC law school ceremonies, SFGate– –FireJohnYoo.org-
San
José youth demonstrate to oppose torture
by Sharat G. Lin
Saturday May 17th, 2008 8:30 PM
from San Francisco
Bay Indy Media
Students from several
San José area high schools rallied to oppose torture used by the Bush
administration in its “war on terror.” They demonstrated waterboarding
at the Almaden Plaza Shopping Center to show that the CIA interrogation
technique is torture, and is illegal under U.S. and international law.
Placing a student volunteer
on an inclined wooden ramp, his face was smothered with a cloth and
water was poured over his nose and mouth every time he refused to answer
a mock interrogator’s angry question. Three other students held the
“enemy combatant prisoner” in place as he struggled to breathe
during the waterboarding procedure. Of course, it was a controlled simulation,
but it was being demonstrated to the public to prove that the CIA interrogation
technique is indeed torture.
When asked about the demonstration, a passing shopper said, “It
certainly looks like torture to me. It’s quite realistic.”
About two dozen students from various area schools, including Leigh
High School and Gunderson High School in San José and American High
School in Fremont, participated in the demonstration at the Almaden
Plaza Shopping Center in South San José on Saturday, May 17, 2008.
They held signs demanding, “No war” and “Impeach.”
Some also carried signs from the antiwar organization World Can’t Wait,
saying, “Iraq: Get out. Iran: Stay out. Bush and Cheney: Drive
out.” Being a busy shopping day, the students handed out many flyers
to passing shoppers and motorists.
Waterboarding is a technique that the Bush administration has admitted
using to extract confessions from alleged “terrorists” held
in Guantánamo Bay and secret U.S. military prisons overseas. Torture
is illegal under U.S. law. For this reason, the White House has fiercely
resisted closing the prison in Guantánamo Bay and bringing alleged
“terror suspects” to U.S. soil for trial.
It is also prohibited under the United Nations Convention Against Torture,
which assumed the force of federal law when it was ratified by the U.S.
Senate in 1994. The U.N. Convention states that “no exceptional
circumstances, whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war,
internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be
invoked as a justification of torture.”
Protests against torture are not new in San José. The student protest
follows a long-running campaign against Jeppesen Sanderson, whose local
downtown office is responsible for international trip and flight planning
for extraordinary rendition flights by the CIA that have moved prisoners
to secret locations where they have reportedly been tortured.
War Crimes Start at the
Top
Professor
John Yoo Should be Dismissed From Boalt Law School–And Prosecuted
By CARLOS VILLARREAL
War
crimes start at the top. The torture and deaths at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo;
the humiliation of Iraqi and Afghani detainees in the field; extraordinary
rendition; the indiscriminate killing by rifles and cluster bombs; these
are becoming the new norms of war for which the leaders in the United
States are responsible. And as with the war crimes of the past, the
spilling of blood began with the spilling of ink. The most culpable
are not the young foot soldiers in fatigues holding a naked prisoner
with a dog leash; they are the men and women in suits who craft the
policies.
John Yoo is one of those men in suits,
and it is disgraceful that he is paid by the people of California to
shape the law and young minds at one of our most distinguished law schools.
As an organization, the National Lawyers Guild released a press release
in April stating that Yoo ought to be tried as a war criminal and dismissed
by the University of California Berkeley – Boalt Hall, where he is currently
a law professor.
Academic freedom is a serious issue and
must be addressed in this debate. We’ve all seen how universities have
used tenure and other means to fire and at least attempt to silence
leftist academics. But just because University officials have a bad
track record when it comes to hiring, firing and promoting professors,
doesn’t mean we shouldn’t push them to do the right thing when the circumstances
call for it. In this case, we should acknowledge that the University
ought to provide due process, despite the fact that victims of Yoo’s
legal framework lacked such protection. However, we should urge University
officials to move forward with the normal proceedings for dismissing
a professor, taking into consideration the seriousness of the harm caused
and the power Yoo had in crafting his memoranda.
According to Dean Christopher Edley,
neither the harm caused nor the power and responsibility a professor
wields constitute the test for taking action against Yoo. As Edley wrote
on the Boalt website: “As a legal matter, the test here is the
relevant excerpt from the ‘General University Policy Regarding Academic
Appointees’, adopted for the 10-campus University of California by both
the system-wide Academic Senate and the Board of Regents: Types of unacceptable
conduct: ” Commission of a criminal act which has led to conviction
in a court of law and which clearly demonstrates unfitness to continue
as a member of the faculty.”
In this case Yoo clearly violated the
second part of the standard put forth by Edley, but he has yet to be
convicted of a crime by any court of law. It shouldn’t matter. The same
Personnel Manual Edley sites states that “Other types of serious
misconduct, not specifically enumerated herein, may nonetheless be the
basis for disciplinary action …” It also specifically states
as a reason for discipline: “Serious violation of University policies
governing the professional conduct of faculty, including but not limited
to policies applying to research, outside professional activities, conflicts
of commitment, clinical practices, violence in the workplace, and whistleblower
protections.”
There are a lot of facts for Boalt Hall
to consider in the course of a fair hearing. His memoranda and other
evidence have been presented in the public domain, and Yoo has not distanced
himself from any of it. Hopefully a court of law will eventually come
to the conclusion that he (and Rumsfeld, Gonzalez, Bush, Cheney, et.al.)
is guilty of a crime, but it isn’t clear that the right-leaning justice
system in this country will take action without a great deal of pressure,
if at all. Regardless, the law is pretty clear about how such prisoners
should be treated. More importantly, the fact that Yoo ignored important
and universal moral principles in the substance of his memoranda, and
the very decision to submit his memoranda knowing what the consequences
would be, is shocking. If the University of California discovered that
a UCSF medical professor had knowingly contributed to illegal research
that harmed human subjects, would they allow her to continue teaching?
I sincerely hope not, and depending on the facts, I would urge them
to take some sort of action, even if this hypothetical professor had
yet to be prosecuted or convicted of any crime.
Boalt ought to also consider the power
and responsibility Yoo had when he wrote his memoranda. He wasn’t writing
an opinion for a small business or county government. He was writing
for the most powerful military and most powerful regime on the planet
as they engaged in a global war; and he was writing about prisoners
who were already captured and fully secured.
The other very live question that lawyers
and legal scholars are asking is whether attorneys should face criminal
consequences for their purely professional conduct. But this presumes
that the issue is merely one of bad or faulty legal advice or that the
act is one that falls fully within Yoo’s professional conduct. In this
case the analogy is more like a lawyer advising his client that committing
assault is perfectly legal, where assaulting someone is both illegal
and immoral, and the attorney is really just trying to push the limits
of the law to provide cover for his client’s beating up someone.
There is precedent for criminal liability
against attorneys in circumstances not unlike the Yoo case. Philippe
Sands, among others, has recently revisited the Nuremberg case of United
States v. Altstoetter in a scathing two-part story in Vanity Fair called
“The Green Light.” Sands writes that the case “had been
prosecuted by the Allies to establish the principle that lawyers and
judges in the Nazi regime bore a particular responsibility for the regime’s
crimes.” The principal defendant in that case was imprisoned for
five years, primarily for performing as an attorney – giving legal advice
(or more accurately legal cover) for the “disappearing” of
political opponents of the Nazi regime.
John Yoo created a legal framework that
would allow torture; and just like the lawyerly work that led to convictions
in Altstoetter, it wasn’t done as a purely academic or philosophical
exercise. He created this framework to enable torturers; to give cover
and help set in motion policies that would directly lead to the pain,
suffering and death of prisoners held by the United States against accepted
international law. This is why Yoo ought to be dismissed by Boalt, disbarred,
and prosecuted for war crimes.
Carlos Villarreal is Executive
Director of the National Lawyers Guild San Francisco Bay Area Chapter.
He can be reached at carlos@nlgsf.org