Protest at 5/17 Graduation, Boalt Law School. John Yoo did his most
notorious damage as deputy assistant attorney general for the Bush
administration’s Office of Legal Counsel, where his legal opinions were
used to justify torture. But he is still a professor at UC Berkeley’s
Boalt Law School. We’re going to be at the Boalt graduation on the
morning of May 17, 2008 to demand he be fired, disbarred, and
prosecuted for his criminal lawyering as a Bush administration
official. We plan to have orange jump suits & our cage, lots of
orange ribbons that we’ll ask people to wear inside the graduation, and
excellent signs for the many expected to come out for this action.
| Organizing Materials for Event |
Join us at the Hearst Greek Theatre, Berkeley California (east side of campus) Saturday May 17, 2008 at 8am (ticketed guests will all be inside by 9 – you can take a nap in the afternoon!!!). PLEASE RSVP by writing to ActAgainstTorture@riseup.net . We’re looking for a major presence at this event now that John Yoo’s full complicity in attempting to grant the torture-administration immunity has been revealed (see below). The graduation ceremony starts at nine, but our protest will happen BEFORE the ceremony, beginning at 8 am when the gates at the Greek Theatre open to guests (only folks with tickets will be allowed inside, but we’ll have plenty of opportunity to make our point as students, faculty, and families arrive through the two entrances to the Greek Theatre). During the ceremony we’ll take a coffee break, and will return to line the route between the Greek Theatre and the Boalt Law School where a reception will be held.
John Yoo’s legal brief of March 14, 2003, advising the White House how it could get away with torture, was released to the public in April 2008. Jameel Jaffer, director of the ACLU’s national security project, said Yoo’s legal reasoning puts “literally no limit at all to the kinds of interrogation methods that the president can authorize. […] The memo was meant to allow torture, and that’s exactly what it did.” In the wake of the memo’s release, the National Lawyer’s Guild has called for Yoo’s dismissal from his position at UC Berkeley, his disbarment, and his prosecution for war crimes. The Center for Constitutional Rights has released a letter in support of this call.
A note to Boalt graduates and their families: Please be assured that the graduates and their families and friends are not the targets of our protest. We have no intention of heckling attendees or disrupting the graduation. However, we do believe that it is an appropriate time and place to express our outrage that someone who is clearly guilty of war crimes under all internationally recognized standards is teaching constitutional and international law at Berkeley. We hope that attendees will agree with this position and choose to express that by wearing an orange ribbon during the ceremony. Rather than diminishing their pride in their accomplishment, taking a stand against injustice should increase it.