<html>
<body>
<h1><font size=4><b>Center for Constitutional Rights Supports National
Lawyers Guild Call for Dismissal and Prosecution of John
Yoo</b></font></h1><font size=3>
<a href="http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/17183" eudora="autourl">
http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/17183<br><br>
</a>April 18, 2008 By <b>Marjorie Cohn</b> <br><br>
On April 1, a secret 81-page memo written by former Deputy Assistant
Attorney General John Yoo in March 2003 was made public. In that
memo, Yoo advised the Bush administration that the Department of
Justice's Office of Legal Counsel would not enforce U.S.criminal
laws, including federal statutes against torture, assault, maiming and
stalking in the detention and interrogation of enemy combatants.
The week after the publication of Yoo's memo, the National Lawyers Guild
issued a press release calling for the
BoaltHallLawSchoolat the Universityof to dismiss Yoo, who is now a
professor of law there. The NLG also called for the prosecution of
Yoo for war crimes and for his disbarment.California <br><br>
Two days later, the Center for Constitutional Rights released a letter
supporting the NLG's call for Yoo's dismissal and prosecution. CCR
Executive Director Vincent Warren wrote, "The 'Torture Memo' was not
an abstract, academic foray. Rather, it was crafted to sidestep
U.S.and international laws that make coercive interrogation and torture a
crime. It was written with the knowledge that its legal conclusions were
to be applied to the interrogations of hundreds of individual
detainees... And it worked. It became the basis for the CIA's use of
extreme interrogation methods as well the basis for DOD interrogation
policy... Yoo's legal opinions as well as the others issued by the Office
of Legal Counsel were the keystone of the torture program, and were the
necessary precondition for the torture program's creation and
implementation."<br><br>
The day after the NLG issued its press release, Boalt Hall Dean
Christopher Edley, Jr. posted a statement on the Boalt Hall website,
responding to "the <i>New York Times</i> (editorial April 4), the
National Lawyers' Guild, and hundreds of individuals from around the
world" who had criticized or questioned Yoo's continuing employment
at Boalt Hall.<br><br>
Dean Edley cited the Universityof California's Academic Personnel
Manual sec. 015, which lists under "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." Edley said he was not convinced Yoo had
engaged in "clear professional misconduct - that is, some breach of
the professional ethics applicable to a government attorney - material to
Professor Yoo's academic position." Edley was likewise not
convinced "the writing of the memoranda, and [Yoo's] related
conduct, violate[d] a criminal or comparable statute."<br><br>
Edley felt Yoo's conduct was not "morally equivalent to that of his
nominal clients, Secretary Rumsfeld, <i>et al., </i>or comparable to the
conduct of interrogators distant in time, rank, and place."
Edley wrote, "Yes, it does matter that Yoo was an adviser, but
President Bush and his national security appointees were the
deciders."<br><br>
Indeed, ABC News reported last week that Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice,
Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, George Tenet, and John Ashcroft met in the
White House and micromanaged the torture of terrorism suspects by
approving specific torture techniques such as waterboarding. George
W. Bush, the decider-in-chief, admitted, "yes, I'm aware our
national security team met on this issue. And I approved."<br><br>
These top U.S.officials are liable for war crimes under the U.S.
War Crimes Act, and for violation of the Convention Against Torture and
the Geneva Conventions, which are all part of U.S.law. They
ordered the torture which was carried out by the interrogators.<br><br>
But John Yoo and the other Justice Department lawyers, including David
Addington, Jay Bybee, William Haynes and Alberto Gonzales, are also
liable for the same offenses. They were an integral part of a
criminal conspiracy to violate U.S.laws. In <i>U.S. v.
Altstoetter</i>, Nazi lawyers were convicted of war crimes and crimes
against humanity for advising Hitler on how to "legally"
disappear political suspects to special detention camps. The
United Statescharged that since they were lawyers, "not farmers or
factory workers," they should have known their technical
justifications for circumventing the Hagueand Geneva Conventions
were illegal.<br><br>
The cases of <i>Altstoetter</i> and those of the Bush lawyers share
common aspects. Both dealt with people detained during wartime who
were not POWs; in both, it was reasonably foreseeable that the advice
they gave would result in great physical or mental harm or death to many
detainees; and in both, the advice was legally erroneous. More than
108 people have died in U.S.detention since 9/11, many from
torture. And the Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel
later withdrew the memoranda, an admission that the advice in them was
defective.<br><br>
Furthermore, the Bush lawyers have engaged in ethical violations which
should result in their disbarment. As New York University School of
Law Professor Stephen Gillers wrote in <i>The Nation</i>, H. Marshall
Jarrett, counsel for the Justice Department's Office of Professional
Responsibility, who is examining the legal advice these lawyers provided,
"should find that this work is not 'consistent with the professional
standards that apply to Department of Justice attorneys.'"<br><br>
Even Dean Edley appears to recognize that the case of John Yoo is not a
simple issue of academic freedom, such as "merely some professor
vigorously expounding controversial and even extreme
views."<br><br>
As CCR President Michael Ratner wrote in the forthcoming book, <i>The
Trial of Donald Rumsfeld</i>, "Had these various opinions been
written as a law school or academic exercise, they could be merely
condemned and their authors would fail their class, but they would not be
held criminally accountable. But they were not an academic exercise. They
were written by high-level attorneys [such as John Yoo] in a context
where the opinions represented the governing law and were to be employed
by the President in setting detainee policy. This was more than bad
lawyering; this was aiding and abetting their clients' violation of the
law by justifying the commission of a crime using false legal
rhetoric."<br><br>
It is inconceivable that Attorney General Michael Mukasey, who has served
as a rubber stamp for Bush's illegal policies, will bring any of these
leaders or lawyers to justice. There is a chance that a future
attorney general will do so. Barack Obama has pledged to have his
Justice Department and Attorney General "immediately review the
information that's already there and to find out are there inquiries that
need to be pursued . . . if crimes have been committed, they should be
investigated . . . Now, if I found out that there were high officials who
knowingly, consciously broke existing laws, engaged in coverups of those
crimes with knowledge forefront, then I think a basic principle of our
Constitution is nobody above the law." Congress should repeal
the provision of the Military Commissions Act that would give these
deciders and lawyers immunity from prosecution for torture and other
mistreatment committed from September 11, 2001 to December 30, 2005.
<br><br>
In addition to criminal prosecutions, disbarments, and the dismissal of
John Yoo from the Boalt Hall faculty, Jay Bybee, who was rewarded for his
illegal advice with a federal judgeship, should be removed from the bench
by impeachment. <br><br>
It is time for the impunity enjoyed by the Bush administration to come to
an end.<br><br>
<i>Marjorie Cohn is a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law and the
President of the National Lawyers Guild. She is the author of
"CowboyRepublic: Six Ways the Bush Gang Has Defied the
Law." Her articles are archived at
<a href="http://www.marjoriecohn.com/">www.marjoriecohn.com</a>.
<br><br>
<br><br>
</i></font><x-sigsep><p></x-sigsep>
<font size=3 color="#FF0000">Freedom Archives<br>
522 Valencia Street<br>
San Francisco, CA 94110<br><br>
</font><font size=3 color="#008000">415 863-9977<br><br>
</font><font size=3 color="#0000FF">
<a href="http://www.freedomarchives.org/" eudora="autourl">
www.Freedomarchives.org</a></font><font size=3> </font></body>
</html>