A ruling that allowed a prisoner to sue former Bush administration attorney John Yoo for devising the legal theories that justified his alleged torture threatens to "open the floodgates to politically motivated lawsuits" against government officials, Yoo's lawyers say. [...] Yoo, a UC Berkeley law professor, was a Justice Department lawyer from 2001 to 2003 and wrote a series of memos on interrogation, detention and presidential powers.
The best known was a 2002 document that said that rough treatment of captives amounted to torture only if it caused the same level of pain as "organ failure, impairment of bodily function or even death." The memo also said the president may have the power to authorize torture of enemy combatants.
Another Yoo memo said that U.S. military forces could use any means necessary to seize and hold terror suspects in the United States.
The article didn't go quite far enough about Yoo's position. Yoo held that Americans can be arrested & tortured by our government.
Personally? I think justice would be served if Yoo should be abducted, tortured and confess to his crimes against the Constitution ... or maybe just disbarred and lose his tenure.
(Bergen, McCarthy, Snerd, WCFields-You Can't Cheat an Honest Man)
Chapman University (used to be called Chapman College; University sounds much more chi chi) is a small college deep in Orange Co., CA. My mom lived a few miles away, as did I once upon a time. And my brother even took a class or 3 there.
Notable faculty include Hugh (I'm actually a tool) Hewitt, so that doesn't speak well of the staff. In fact, 2 quotes from Wikipedia (yeah, I know) clearly demonstrate HH's bias and hypocrisy:
A recurring theme on Hewitt's show is accusing the mainstream media of liberal bias and lack of transparency, and the unwillingness of its members to answer questions about their own political beliefs. Hewitt has said that the modern paradigm of reportage, whereby journalists make a claim to objectivity while never answering questions about their own beliefs, allows a deep-seated culture of liberal media bias to be perpetuated.
He returned to California in 1989 to oversee construction of the Richard M. Nixon Library as the Library's executive director from groundbreaking through dedication and opening. In 1990, Hewitt sparked controversy by proposing screening of researchers wishing to use the library resources — e.g., Hewitt suggested refusing admission to researchers deemed "unfriendly," — specifically Bob Woodward — because he was "not a responsible journalist."
Yeah, so HH's bias is OK, anyone else's is, you know Teh Liberal Bias™.
But Chapman U. has landed an even more important fish. As Ian points out:
Academic freedom is very important. Universities exist to produce knowledge, uncontrained by political winds or the whims of wealthy donors. If professors live in fear of termination without good cause, they cannot contribute their university’s mission.
So even though I would have fired John Yoo from the Berkley faculty—not because of his repugnant viewpoints, but because his incompetent representation of a former client, the United States of America, calls into question his ethical fitness to train young lawyers—I am sympathetic to the reasons why Berkley allows him to stay.
What is completely incomprehensible to me, however, is why a different university, which is not bound by a tenure agreement with Professor Yoo, would nonetheless hire him as a visiting faculty member. Admittedly, that school is Chapman Law School, whose faculty boasts such legal luminaries as Rush Limbaugh wannabe Hugh Hewitt, but Chapman’s most recent hire can do little more than take a school whose most famous professor makes them a punchline, and turn that school into a tragic embarrassment.
Chapman Law Dean John Eastman, who worked with Yoo as co-clerks to Justice Thomas, claims that this new hire is to bring “publicity” to his relatively young law school, and it has already accomplished that goal. I could also garner publicity by advising my client to torture helpless captives, but I doubt it would turn out well for any organization foolish enough to hire me afterwards.
John Yoo, who wrote the comically awful memos approving anything done to prisoners of war that GWBush dared to dream, that John Yoo. The John Yoo who deemed Habeus Corpus too lenient. John Yoo, who sat alongside David Addington on Dick Cheney's lap like Mortimer Snerd & Charlie McCarthy, saying the words of the master who pulled the strings inside his back.
John Yoo; a legal mind for the ages. The Dark Ages.
Good on you, Chapman U. Fight on for . . . torture.
The Nuremberg Defense is a legal defense that essentially states that the defendant was "only following orders" ("Befehl ist Befehl", literally "order is order") and is therefore not responsible for his crimes. The defense was most famously employed during the Nuremberg Trials, after which it is named.
Yoo really did want to please his overlords, didn't he?
