Legal News

John Yoo, author of 'torture memos,' misses chance to mix it up with 9th Circuit

By Jason Siegel

John Yoo, author of what have become known as the torture memos (part 1, part 2) while in the Office of Legal Counsel, was "detained at the Oakland Airport for six hours" and missed an opportunity to address the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judicial Conference on presidential power.

What 9th Circuit Judge Consuelo Callahan probably meant was that the controversial law professor at the University of California, Berkeley was "delayed" at the airport due to foggy weather, rather than held by authorities.

The panel on executive power, examining whether the president has to obey the law, drew the largest crowd so far at this week's conference in hopes of seeing sparks fly among Yoo; Seth Waxman, former solicitor general in the Clinton Administration and now a partner at Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale & Dorr; Kenneth Starr, former special prosecutor in the Clinton Whitewater investigation and now dean at Pepperdine University School of Law; and Kathleen Sullivan, a professor at Stanford Law School.

Yoo went before Congress in June to defend his role in shaping the Bush Administration's legal defense of harsh interrogation tactics outlined in a 2002 memo while he was a lawyer in the Office of Legal Counsel. The now-infamous memo said the government was allowed to use coercive techniques and defined torture narrowly as pain of an intensity likely to cause organ failure, impairment of bodily function or even death.

Without Yoo, Callahan quickly dragooned conference keynote speaker, Paul Clement, former solicitor general in the Bush Administration, to substitute for Yoo.

Clement, who agreed to stand in, told the crowd, "I can't be Yoo, I can only be me."

-- Pamela A. MacLean

Full post as published by Legal Pad | LA on July 30, 2008 (boomark / email).