by Joe Hawkins
One of the key legal architects of the tidal wave of
injustice unleashed upon the world by the Bush regime, John Yoo’s hands are
drenched with the blood of every prisoner tortured by the US
forces in the “War on Terrorism.” He has argued for giving President
Bush absolute power to declare war on anyone and anything he deems fit, as well
as the right to torture anyone he wants to, without having to answer to anyone.
Applying the methods of Holocaust deniers to the US
Constitution and international law, Yoo attempts to systematically defend and
justify the Bush regime’s total disregard for human rights by rewriting history
in his new book, The Powers of War and Peace. Any country that the Bush
regime wishes to overthrow is referred to by Yoo as being ruled by a government
that is an illegitimate “pseudo-state.” This is a thinly veiled
effort to deny the people under attack their fundamental rights under
international law (see Yoo’s
9, 2002
Conveniently, these “pseudo-states” are regarded by Yoo and his legal
cohorts as legitimate governments when the Bush regime decides to invade their
countries supposedly for breaking the same international laws that the US
is seemingly not bound to.
According to Yoo, the Geneva Convention is
“obsolete” and must be superseded by what amounts to an international
network of torture chambers for those who the US deems terrorists (see his
article, “Rewriting the Laws of War for a New Enemy: The Geneva Convention
Is Not the Last Word “).
In this respect he not only matches the opinion of Attorney General Alberto
Gonzales, but reaches the same level of disregard for international law as the
Nazi regime. Echoing Joseph Mengele and his medicinal torture of concentration
camp victims, Yoo drafted a memo to Gonzales favoring the use of mind-altering
drugs, mental and physical torture, and death threats on US detainees (Memo
from Jay Bybee to Alberto Gonzales, “Re: Standards of Conduct for
Interrogation under 18 U.S.C. §§ 2340-2340A,”
debate with Doug Cassel, long time human rights legal scholar and professor at
Notre Dame, John Yoo upheld the right of the President to crush the testicles
of a person’s child, if the President deemed it necessary. Yoo is the legal
lapdog of the Bush crew, trained to twist and bend the law as much as necessary
until whatever the government does is legal and justified.
On October 25, 2005, several World Can’t Wait supporters
disrupted one of John Yoo’s classes at UC-Berkeley while dressed up as US
soldiers/torturers and torture victims. This was a bold and brave step that
they took in confronting Yoo’s fascist offensive right in his face. Afterwards,
one of the students involved in the protest asked, “How bad do things have
to be before we actually take action? I think we should start off now before
things get any worse. We need to stop this before this turns into a situation
like Germany in
the 1930s. We don’t want that to happen. We want to stop it.”
This is a call and a challenge to the millions of people who
feel like the Bush regime is
intolerable and must be driven out: Let there be
no platform for fascists like John Yoo and the other legal and political
apologists for the Bush regime! They must be confronted wherever they are, at
every public appearance, and shown that the people will not tolerate this
Orwellian global empire under the command of Bush and his crew. Take
inspiration from the Berkeley WCW supporters and step up the fight against John
Yoo whenever he rears his head: for a world without torture, which cannot be
made possible without driving out the Bush regime.