By Cheryl Abraham
What’s the big deal anyway? Why
try to get some university professor fired and disbarred just because
he wrote some stuff that supports what the Bush administration is
doing? So what? Besides, the man has a right to free speech doesn’t he?
And what about all those professors before him who have gotten fired or
been threatened with losing their jobs because of their left leaning
propensities – that was unfair and unjust wasn’t it? So getting Yoo
fired would be just the same thing – only it would be for his right
leaning propensities. Just let Yoo do what Yoo does best: teach! Right?
Wrong! And this is why:
Professor John Yoo is a paid professor at U.C. Berkeley of California and his job as professor is to teach the law and in doing so he has the serious honor and responsibility of shaping the minds of the young people who attend his classes, young people who will go on to graduate from one of our nation’s most distinguished law schools. However, John Yoo, in a macabre and Machiavellian manner has proclaimed officially, publicly, and with full intent to influence and guide the most powerful leaders of this country into justifications for torture and abuse of human beings in the “war on terror”. Justifications that are being used in a war that says traditional moral values, international treaties, and the rule of law can simply be dispensed with.
At Professor Yoo’s direction and counsel the United States Government has systematically been subverting the law in regards to the treatment and detainment of those the U.S. has defined as “enemy combatants”, and in doing so has unleashed horror and shame upon our nation and has not only been a party to the physical and mental torture of human beings, but has been a director of it. If Professor Yoo was a party to and director of the physical and mental torture of animals, would people say he was just exercising his free speech rights? Would there be anyone defending him for that?
But not only is Yoo advocating the torture and indefinite detention of human beings, he is defending his position with lies. Glenn Greenwald writes in Salon.com, “One of the most reliable methods for knowing that a position is unsustainable is that its advocates must employ outright falsehoods in order to support it. In a Wall St. Journal Op-Ed today, John Yoo defends the right of the Bush administration to imprison people at Guantanamo indefinitely with no judicial review and condemns last week’s Supreme Court habeas corpus ruling as “judicial imperialism of the highest order.” To do so, Yoo asserts what have become the now-standard though still-blatant falsehoods on this issue.”
It is incredible that a law professor, with the enormous responsibility of teaching America’s future lawyers would assert that habeas corpus, a right that is fundamental to American and all other English common law derivative systems of jurisprudence, is “judicial imperialism”. It is the ultimate lawful and peaceable remedy for adjudicating the providence of liberty’s restraint, preceding even the Magna Carta in 1215. At the very least this smacks of complete incompetence, at the most it is pure evil.
Carlos Villareal, Executive Director of the National Lawyers Guild San Francisco Bay area Chapter said, “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.”
The aiding and abetting of a crime or crimes is NOT free speech, it is a CRIME, and that is what John Yoo has been doing: aiding and abetting the continued criminal behavior of the Bush regime, Yoo should be fired as an incompetent hack, masquerading as a professor of law, he should be disbarred, and he should be formally charged with aiding and abetting war crimes and tried in a court of law.
Should this occur Yoo will most likely make full use of his habeas corpus rights to defend himself.
Cheryl Abraham is a member of World Can’t Wait from the Seattle area and a regular writer for the World Can’t Wait web site.