John Yoo -- it was all his idea
Anyone hear about this guy?
He was one of the top lawyers in the Bush White House for a while who came up with the position that the Geneva Convention was a "quaint" idea.
Evidently this guy is somewhere to the extreme right of Rush Limbaugh, politically speaking, did some law clerking for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and when he quit the White House, got a bunch of teaching jobs at various big-name universities. Now the universities are having second thoughts about this guy . . .
IMHO, they shouldn't fire the guy, because as schools should be places where a wide variety of opinions should be heard, you can't have "wide" if one end is chopped off. But folks should be aware of how he thinks . . . and folks should be aware of how his bosses in the White House think, as well . . .
Lots of bad decisions going on, starting with this guy . . .
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Berkeley Law Students Denounce Professor
Sat May 22, 5:01 PM ET Add U.S. National - AP to My Yahoo!
By TERENCE CHEA, Associated Press Writer
SAN FRANCISCO - Nearly 200 law students and alumni at the University of California, Berkeley have denounced a professor who helped the Bush administration develop what critics say is the legal framework that led to the abuse of Iraqi prisoners.
The professor, John Yoo, co-wrote a legal memo in 2002 that laid out reasons the United States did not have to comply with international treaties regarding the treatment of prisoners. Yoo was a top government lawyer at the time.
The document "contributed directly to the reprehensible violation of human rights in Iraq (news - web sites) and elsewhere," according to a petition signed by nearly 200 people from Berkeley's Boalt School of Law.
"We're embarrassed that he's at our institution," said law student Abby Reyes, who launched the petition Thursday. "We came to law school in order to uphold the rule of law, not to learn ways to wiggle our way out of compliance with it."
Protesting students planned to wear red armbands during Boalt's commencement ceremony Saturday afternoon and pass out fliers denouncing Yoo for "aiding and abetting war crimes."
The student petition urges Yoo to repudiate the memo, declare his opposition to torture and encourage the Bush administration to comply with the Geneva Conventions that protect the rights of prisoners of war. Otherwise, he should resign, the petition says.
Yoo said he didn't plan to attend the graduation or resign. He wouldn't comment on the memo or his legal work at the Justice Department (news - web sites), but he said the students have a right to express their opinions.
"I'm happy to listen to their viewpoints. Beyond that I'm not going to change what I think," Yoo, 36, said during a telephone interview Friday. "To the extent that the petition goes beyond expressing views, I worry that it's an unfortunate effort to interfere with academic freedom."
Interim Dean Robert C. Berring Jr. said the law school had no plans to discipline Yoo.
Yoo's memo, and other similar documents, were the subject Friday of a story in The New York Times and were posted on Newsweek's Web site. The memo argued that the normal laws of armed conflict didn't apply to al-Qaida and Taliban militia prisoners because they didn't belong to a state.
