The Torture Memo of Professor John Yoo and the Responsibility of the Faculty of the University of California at Berkeley

For now, I've moved the discussion of Professor John Yoo's Torture Memo over here: http://delong.typepad.com/the_torture_memo/

Comments

[jerry]

I have to thank you and congratulate you for not letting this matter drop.

[M. Carey]

It seems to me that the question is not so much of how to get Yoo fired from the Law School; the question is - how to get him and the others- in front of a war crimes trial ?
Otherwise, I also applaud your attention to this.

[SvN]

Response to M. Carey;

I think the answer is to have him travel overseas...

[nom]

big connard :D

[Stlinquirer]

SvN, you're a genius. Seriously, it's time for an international conference on law and public policy. Keynote speakers: John Yoo, David Addington. So the question is where could we hold the conference to maximize the likelihood of them at least being inconvenienced by some actual charges against them?

[Stlinquirer]

Here's one:

http://www.atiner.gr/docs/Law.htm

Let's get him invited! (What's Greece's policy re: war crimes?)

[Stlinquirer]

Here's a better one in Brazil:

http://www.ilsa.org/conference/international.php

Maybe we could venue shop for the location most likely to pick these guys up when they step off the plane.

[M. Carey]

Hey ! why should we need to depend on other people to deal with our own torturers and war criminals ??

We need to take care of our own business. I hope that Obama will have more cohones next year than that Clinton (Bill) had in 1993 when he decided NOT to pursue the Iran- Contra criminals – Many of whom, of course, later went on to fame and fortune in Iraq.

[astrid]

Thank you Professor Delong. I hope to live in a country that will be just enough to call Yoo and other Bushies the war criminals that they truly are. The fact that there hasn't been more outcry on the Berkeley campus is frankly outrageous to me.

[non-lawyer]

Brad, since the early indications are that Berkeley will line up behind a do nothing position that protects Yoo perhaps you should be asking:

Now that Berkeley has set the bar so low as to what kind of person they are happy to have and support working here, just what would it take for someone to not be acceptable at this "prestigious" university?

[wetzel]

((I posted this comment in the old May 8 thread before. Upon discovering my mistake I have reposted it here.))

Brad, you have placed Professor Drumond in a position where to initiate an action in defense of a thousand year tradition of law against, torture he must push up to the line, and maybe cross the line into an improper form of inquisition. The question of your standing, and the Senate's standing, is really important, I think, to interpreting the rationale of his reply.

For us who are outraged over what Yoo and the others have done in our name, his reply seems like a really thin gruel. I think he is probably taking the right approach, unfortunately. Although your approach in the letter is to present the inquiry as a fact-finding approach, information gathering, and liberal discourse, you are really calling to subject Yoo to an Inquisition. It is disingenuous to misrepresent what would have called for as a scholarly inquiry when the stakes professionally and possibly criminally for Yoo would make it more of a grand jury proceeding or a judicial inquiry.

There is another tradition in law going back even further than prohibition of state torture governing the standing of complainants in proceedings. The question of standing to speak is a settled wisdom that is a first order concern of any parliamentary organization. In the light of this, Dr. Drumond understands the limitations of his position. The controller of the floor must withstand those who would advocate the parliament assume a role for which it was not intended or proper. Obviously the introduction of matters of professional misconduct by peers within a university against each other to the floor of the Senate for debate must involve the questino of the standing of the complainant. Certainly it is not permitted for one faculty member to initiate an inquiry by the Senate against another faculty member as an individual Professor, and if there were such a process it would certainly need to be extremely circumspect and deliberative before even the first proposal of inquiry were public, no matter how egregious the complaint. I imagine Professor Drumond is a bit peeved that you do not seem to understand the dangers of Inquisition, because if you did then you would understand you have put the Inquisition on him, because many readers will see his reply simplistically and view him as Kafkaesque, cowardly, or participating in the banality of evil. The ability of a university administrator to accept this perception of their bland, indifferent replies as a bad thing is frankly sacramental.

Because the seriousness of John Yoo's Torture Memo extends to criminal behavior, I feel that an inquiry at the university level, especially at this early stage, is not proper because there would not be proper rules of evidence and processes ensuring objectivity and transparency. In a Berkeley inquisition, how would evidence of law breaking produced through the inquiry be referred to the Justice Department? Although I suspect that Professor Drumond would probably want to see Cheney, Yoo, Bush all at the Hague like the rest of his do, he modulated his reply to even have the not too diplomatic mention of the word 'defamatory', which is his way of kicking your shins a bit for catching up the Senate in the overall legal crisis of having a criminal in the White House. It is beyond their scope. I think you should not hold the letter against him because it is written to be exactly bland and imperturbable to protect the Senate against becoming an inquisition, which is a first order responsibility.

[Matt]

If Berkeley has an international relations department, check to see if they allow waterboarding where John could transfer.

[YB]

I think this post is breaking feedburner RSS. The RSS feed has not been updated since May 10th.

[Leila Abu-Saba]

YB I had to change which feed I subscribed to - I had the same problem. It's still not working so well. I gave up and now just go directly to the site.