Legal News

City council may press war crime charges against tenured Berkeley professor

By Richard Binder

John Yoo, a tenured professor at UC Berkeley's Boalt Hall School of Law, wrote memos offering legal justification for torture while working as deputy assistant attorney general in the Justice Department?s Office of Legal Counsel from 2001 to 2003.  A highlight from those memos includes the following: "If a government defendant were to harm an enemy combatant during an interrogation in a manner that might arguably violate a criminal prohibition, he would be doing so in order to prevent further attacks on the United States by the al-Qaida terrorist network. In that case, we believe that he could argue that the executive branch's constitutional authority to protect the nation from attack justified his actions."  Yoo defended the memos to the Washington Post back in April of this year, claiming his advice to the President was "near boilerplate." 

Yoo's words are coming back to haunt him as Berkeley's City Council votes next week whether to demand the United States charge him with war crimes.  In addition to those charges, the city will decide whether to order Boalt to offer alternatives to Yoo's courses, so no student is forced to take a class from him if they don't want to. 

Boalt spokeswoman Susan Gluss said Yoo is well-liked and encourages different viewpoints in his classroom.  He has taught constitutional and international law at Boalt since 1993.

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Full post as published by Legal Pad | LA on December 05, 2008 (boomark / email).