FIRE JOHN YOO!

Protest Fascist Scholarship and Aspirations

May 28, 2017 2:54 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

What role do political scientists play in the normalization of the crimes of your government?

The American Political Science Association (APSA) has engaged UC Berkeley torture advocate John Yoo for two sessions of its "Quest for Legitimacy":

The Future of the Judiciary

Thursday August 31, 10:00 to 11:30am

Hilton San Francisco Union Square

Checks on Executive Power in the Age of Obama and Trump

Friday September 1, 4:00 to 5:30pm

Hilton San Francisco Union Square

Berkeley Law School harbors a War Criminal. APSA gives him a platform. We say NO! Not In Our Name! Indict, Prosecute, Disbar John Yoo!

New Berkeley Law Dean Has 'High Regard' for War Criminal

May 17, 2017 2:42 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

A lawyer for the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington has embraced complicity in sheltering Torture Professor John Yoo. . .

"I have very high regard for John Yoo as a scholar and as a teacher and I know that he's a terrific colleague," Erwin Chemerinsky said. "I look forward to being his colleague."

The new dean expressed his priorities: Raising money, and continuing to attract "top faculty and students." Presumably those willing to close their eyes to the Federal Torture Act.

Shame on John Yoo.

Shame on the University of California.

Shame on Lawyers who put Career above the Law.

Not In the Public Interest: Heritage Foundation Lawyers Complicit in the Crimes of Your Government

May 9, 2017 1:05 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

"A grim reality underlies the White House circus," writes Theo Anderson at In These Times. "Trump's election is the culmination of a radical right-wing movement that began with the founding of [the Heritage Foundation] in 1973. . . Trump is that movement's best hope yet for achieving its great dream of gutting government. Heritage isn't an appendage of the Trump administration's radicalism. It's the heart of it."

"If you are looking to understand where the underpinning of the Trump Administration's deregulation, tax breaks for the wealthy, Obamacare repeal and replace alternatives, climate change denial, and privatization agenda will be coming from, look no further than the Washington D.C. based Heritage Foundation, America's most influential right-wing think tank." - Bill Berkowitz for Buzzflash at Truthout

The last thing humanity needs is for Donald Trump to "make America great again." From the foundational institution of slavery to tireless exploitation of resources across the globe, untold numbers of government lawyers have defended crimes against humanity subsidized by U.S. government. The Heritage Foundation boasts more than its share. Staffers in the Trump administration demonstrate an unsettling disregard for legal limitations on executive power.

"Many thousands, if not millions, of people in the United States itself are demonstrably sickened, ashamed and angered by their government's actions, but as things stand they are not a coherent political force - yet," said the late British playwright Harold Pinter upon receipt of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005. "But the anxiety, uncertainty and fear which we can see growing daily in the United States is unlikely to diminish."

World Can't Wait urges you to accept the Refuse Fascism challenge:

Will this be a pivotal moment in which we do act with determination to do all we can to move people - who are right now alarmed and outraged - to take to the streets to demand that this regime be driven from power?

Serious Breaches of the U.S. War Crimes Act, Geneva Conventions, UN Charter, UN Torture Convention, Nuremberg Principles...

April 17, 2017 12:58 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Progressive Radio host Steve Lendman asks why any sensible UC Berkeley law student would choose classes taught by Torture Professor John Yoo, whose infamous Bush/Cheney administration memos "claimed legal justification for what international law categorically prohibits at all times, under all circumstances, with no allowed exceptions."

As deputy assistant attorney general, Yoo sanctioned executive power to:

ignore international, constitutional and U.S. statute laws;
indefinitely detain and torture so-called "enemy combatants";
deny habeas and due process rights, consigning detainees to kangaroo court injustice; and
justify virtually anything to combat real or imagined enemies.

Last week, the professor defended the ultimate war crime, "the act of aggression with or without a declaration of war, on the territory, vessels or aircraft of another State."

Neocon Law Professor Calls Trump's Aggression on Syria Constitutional

We Have Been Here Before

April 8, 2017 1:24 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

"In his torture memos, John Yoo, a lawyer for the Bush administration, notoriously asserted the authority of the commander in chief to violate statutory commands -- only to see Presidents Bush and Obama repudiate his extreme assertions. But the present case [President Trump's airstrike on Syria] is even more serious," says NY Times op-ed contributor Bruce Ackerman. The U.S. Congress provides shaky agency for moral righteousness: a bipartisan majority supports reprisal against Syria's President Assad absent evidence or due process.

Did we learn anything from the Iraq war?

"If the commander in chief may unilaterally begin new wars against new enemies whenever he wants, the resulting carnage can mount into the millions," adds Ackerman.

Sayin' It Don't Make It So

April 6, 2017 9:28 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

"The delusion that holds that U.S. presidents have the power to make laws," writes author, activist, journalist, and radio host David Swanson, "whether closing transgender bathrooms, banning Muslim immigrants, or criminalizing torture, has reached its apex with the collective fantasy that Obama banned and Trump unbanned torture...

"In recent decades we've moved from presidents issuing 'executive orders' and calling them laws, to presidents rewriting laws that they are signing with 'signing statements', to presidents secretly creating laws (and signing statements) in hidden memos, to presidents secretly or publicly tossing out their choice of the presidential 'laws' created by their predecessors, all the way to presidents just making laws by announcing them on television or Twitter."

Can the president write his own laws and procedures? "It is a fairly common rhetorical flourish for presidential candidates to say something like 'when elected, I will repeal' a law," notes American legal journalist Lyle Denniston. "But they can't... the process for repealing a law has to begin in Congress."

Legality Is Not a Matter of Opinion.

International Criminal Court to Investigate Illegally Sanctioned Torture

April 2, 2017 1:47 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

"In a matter of weeks, the International Criminal Court (ICC) is expected to open a full-fledged investigation into the 'war crimes of torture and related ill-treatment, by United States military forces deployed to Afghanistan and in secret detention facilities operated by the Central Intelligence Agency,' " submits Loyola Law School International Human Rights Clinic director Mary H. Hansel to the Wisconsin Law Review. The author invokes the principle of complementarity (all states have a duty to prosecute or extradite suspected perpetrators of international crimes when the state of the alleged perpetrator fails to exercise jurisdiction) to prescribe legal proceedings against government lawyers who authorized the use of 'enhanced interrogation' techniques amounting to torture.

"Contrary to popular belief," says Hansel, "there is nothing about functioning in a legal capacity that immunizes lawyers from prosecution for their participation in crimes." Former Office of Legal Counsel John Yoo, attorney general Alberto Gonzales, undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith, general counsel for the Department of Defense William Haynes II, Dick Cheney's chief of staff David Addington, and now-judge of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals Jay Bybee were all involved in the drafting of torture memos that facilitated war crimes of torture, cruel treatment and rape.

In an ICC report dated November 14, 2016 chief prosecutor Fatou Bensouda found "these alleged crimes were not the abuses of a few isolated individuals." The report stated that the U.S. Army soldiers subjected at least 61 detainees to torture practices, and CIA officers did so to at least 27 detainees, mostly between May, 2003 and December, 2004, but continued after that date.

Time will tell if the ICC pursues charges, adds Hansel. "Meanwhile, members of the Trump Administration, including newly-confirmed attorney general Jeff Sessions, have indicated that they deem torture a viable option in the treatment of detained terrorist suspects.

"Indeed, the provision of legal cover for torture by government attorneys may be a recurrent problem in years to come."

Torture Facilitator Seeking White House Position

March 30, 2017 12:35 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Former acting head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel Steven G. Bradbury was spotted outside the Office of Presidential Personnel last week, reports Ryan J. Reilly to The Huffington Post, ostensibly peddling his expertise in abusive treatment of political prisoners to the Trump administration.

Bradbury coauthored (with his pals Jay Bybee and John Yoo) the infamous "torture memos" -- legal opinions to justify CIA brutality at Guantanamo and "black sites" around the globe -- one of which authorized the use of 13 different "enhanced interrogation techniques": dietary manipulation, nudity, attention grasp, walling, facial hold, facial slap or insult slap, abdominal slap, cramped confinement, wall standing, stress positions, water dousing, sleep deprivation of more than 48 hours, and waterboarding.

That last technique (waterboarding) holds particular appeal to Donald Trump, who wants to reinstitute the practice, saying "absolutely" he believes torture works, that "as far as [he's] concerned, we have to fight fire with fire." Torture's also a War Crime, a grave breach of the Geneva Conventions ratified by the United States in 1949.

"The President appears hell bent on creating a world where all nations stoop to the most base behavior, where nothing is off limits, where no one upholds decency, human rights and the rule of law," reads a comment to The Northern Echo. Former Bush officials appear only too happy to collaborate with the legion of white supremacists, woman haters, science deniers, religious fundamentalist zealots, and war mongers inflicting repression and suffering on people in this country, violence on people across the globe, and destruction of the planet itself.

Voices of Conscience demand that these criminal practices stop now. We have an obligation not only to prosecute war crimes and crimes against humanity after they occur but to put an end to the shameful policies which allow them to continue.

We say NO! to Torture and NO! to Trump Supporters who advocate its use. We refuse to accept the dictates of an illegitimate government!

Is Nothing Sacred? John Yoo Targets National Monuments

March 28, 2017 10:52 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

On Wednesday, March 29, the American Enterprise Institute will release a new paper John Yoo and I [Todd Gaziano, Pacific Legal Foundation] wrote, "Presidential Authority to Revoke or Reduce National Monument Designations," which explains why presidential decrees are not "permanent" under our constitutional order, especially not pursuant to the Antiquities Act of 1906. That afternoon on Capitol Hill, Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah) is hosting an event in the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee Hearing Room on the release of our paper.

If you are in the DC area on Wednesday and wish to attend the event on Capitol Hill, please RSVP to Collin Callahan at CBC@pacificlegal.org or call (703) 647-2112.

Guantanamo Prisoners Left in Limbo

February 22, 2017 4:38 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Of the 41 who remain today -- overseen by some 1,650 troops and civilians -- only 10 have been charged with war crimes. The majority have been detained for more than a decade, and none were captured by the U.S. military. -- Foreign Policy reporter Molly O'Toole

The $8.4 million renovation of Camp 5 proceeds as planned, presumably to house "bad dudes" of Donald Trump's choosing. Guantánamo supporters argue that the expense is cause to expand use of the American concentration camp. "We've invested a lot of money" in Guantánamo, and it's a "safe place to keep prisoners," says Attorney General Jeff Sessions. "It fits that purpose marvelously well."

Prisoner defense lawyers find a different motivation at work. "Guantánamo is at its core a place to send Muslim men and boys to be abused and forgotten, with only the most minimal judicial oversight and visibility to media," says Shayana Kadidal.

"So of course Trump loves it."

Trump Finalizing Executive Order to Put ISIS Detainees in Guantánamo

So Who Is John Yoo, Exactly?

February 7, 2017 12:34 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

"He's a lawyer and professor most famously known for helping give President George W. Bush the authority to torture suspects in the wake of the 9/11 attacks," begins Laura Hankin at Romper...

Yoo is no liberal "snowflake." This is the guy who, when he served in Bush's Justice Department, authored a series of memorandums providing legal arguments that the torture of detainees in the War on Terror was within the law, and not a war crime. According to tapes of a debate found by The Intercept, Yoo even defended the legal right of a president to torture children. As NBC News reported, he's part of the reason that the United States went to war in Afghanistan, and that Bush was able to open the ethically-dubious detention center in Guantanamo Bay. And when it came to President Barack Obama, Yoo supported his problematic use of drone strikes.

"John Yoo unleashed the 'unitary executive' theory that enabled Bush's torture program," adds Heather Digby Parton at Salon:

This essentially holds that during wartime a president can exercise virtually unlimited authority, which can be checked by Congress only by using the "power of the purse." Since the "war on terror" was a unique construct that could not possibly have a definitive end, that meant the president was to have nearly dictatorial power for the foreseeable future. Among other things, according to Yoo, the president could suspend the Posse Comitatus Act, which forbids the government to deploy the military for domestic police actions, and the Fourth Amendment, which prevents unreasonable searches and seizures, by holding that they don't apply to domestic military operations undertaken during a "war on terror."

Donald Trump's "enthusiastic endorsement of torture," as Parton puts it, mirrors that of members of the last Republican administration. "And they didn't just talk about it; they actually did it." While it is doubtful that the new President fully grasps Yoo's theory, he demonstrates the conviction that 'if the President does it, it's legal'.

Parton notes that "unfortunately, while Trump may not know or care about the legal precedents behind his actions, his lawyers surely do, and you can be sure they'll be citing Yoo's work on the unitary executive theory. No one could have predicted that Trump, of all people, would become president, but that's exactly why the cumbersome checks and balances were put in place to begin with."

The protestations that "Torture Professor" (who remains in the employ of the University of California, teaching 'ethics' to Constitutional Law students) makes against the way Trump exercises power do not begin to exonerate Yoo's contributions to operation of the State of Horror we suffer.

John Yoo Has 'Grave Concerns' Over Use Of Executive Power -- When It's Not to His Liking

February 6, 2017 12:29 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Why is the media pandering to the opinions of a war criminal? Does it really matter what John Yoo (UC Berkeley Law professor and author of the 'Torture Memos' justifying brutal interrogation practices at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay prison camps; more here) thinks?

Actually, it does. To give credence to the opinions of torture advocates serves to 'normalize' the insufferable attack on human rights promulgated under pretext of national security by the Bush regime, embraced by Obama, and promised to Jeff Sessions.

How 'bad' is bad? There are no 'lesser evils' of torture; in application or attribution. The idea that American lives are more important than other's must continue to be discredited. Now more than ever.

Past failure to hold torturers accountable demands renewed passion now to halt the fresh assault on immigrants and others denied legal protection from the genocidal policies of the Trump administration, including revival of torture techniques sanctioned by Berkeley Law administrators, and determination to refuse the 10 Point Plan to Put America [as opposed to Humanity and the Planet] First.

We say NO! The world can't wait to stop the crimes of the Trump Regime!

War on Truth "A Funeral Pyre for Science"

February 1, 2017 12:48 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

The Trump cabal of religious extremists, privatization advocates and racists, as described by Jeremy Scahill, suppresses the science that doesn't fit its agenda, "and that should terrify you," reports Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Michael Hiltzik. "Nearly every day brings a new report of a federal agency told to shut down communications with the public or even members of Congress; tweets about important topics such as climate change removed from the public record; bans on talking to the press."

"Among the first agencies reported to face an information lockdown were the departments of Agriculture and the Interior," continues Hiltzik. "Scientists and other staffers at USDA's Agricultural Research Service, its main scientific arm, were told Monday to stop releasing 'any public-facing documents', including 'news releases, photos, fact sheets, news feeds, and social media content ... until further notice', according to an internal email published by BuzzFeed. Following a public uproar, the ban was rescinded a day later."

Donald Trump started with climate change denial, and proceeded, rapidly, to fetter directives of the Environmental Protection Agency. "We're living in a new era, where an unverified report about possible, unsubstantiated rumors of alleged, unconfirmed evidence hacked from an undisclosed source competes on an equal footing with real information," notes Dr. Brian Moench, President of Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment and a member of the Union of Concerned Scientists. "Trump's strategy is clearly an attempt to delegitimize any source of information that has the temerity to challenge or tarnish him."

In keeping with its overall fascist direction and agenda, the new regime is attacking the foundation of the public's ability to engage in critical thinking: a scientific, evidence-based approach to reality.

The Trump regime's actions to shut down communications by dozens of federal agencies has not gone unopposed. A number of so-called rogue twitter accounts have sprung up to communicate information directly to the public. While all of them can't be verified, an interview has been published with the people behind @ActualEPAFacts, who explained why they took this unprecedented, and potentially career-killing, step:

We all work on climate change research and grant administration. Knowing that our department is not valued by the person who may be leading the agency worries us. Our jobs are at stake. We wanted to be sure that science, real science, continues to have a voice. When the information was deleted from the Badlands NPS site it felt very Orwellian.

"The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears," wrote George Orwell in 1949. "It was their final, most essential command."

Impeachment Is One Way to Fire Donald Trump

January 31, 2017 12:12 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

People are mad as hell, and rightfully so, over the President's outrageous action this weekend, his denial of free passage to Muslim air travelers on suspicion of religious affiliation.

"We have a President who says 'I don't follow the law, I don't care, I'm already sitting in the seat'," argues 'Young Turk' Cenk Uygur. "There really isn't any other legal action to be taken against the President who won't follow the law other than impeachment." Impeachment is a possibility that many find unlikely, but...

Are we really stuck with President Trump? asks Georgetown University Law Center professor Rosa Brooks.

"Yes, he is as crazy as everyone feared," she confirms. Pre-inauguration fantasies that Trump would modify his views after taking office have been dispelled during the earliest days of his administration.

Brooks considers four ways to discharge a president in her commentary to the Washington Post. She missed a fifth, a move exemplified Monday night by acting attorney general Sally Yates: the refusal of millions of people across this country to follow his orders.

Resistance to illegitimate governance blossomed today as retired Colonel Ann Wright interrupted the confirmation hearing of Trump's nominee for U.S. Attorney General, Alabama Senator Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III. "I say no to Jeff Sessions, no to hatred, no to racism, no to the ban on refugees," shouted the co-author of the book Dissent: Voices of Conscience before being roughly yanked out of the room by a guard. Of special note: the former soldier received the State Department's Award for Heroism in 1997, the same year an Alabama judge accused Jeff Sessions' State Attorney General's office of gross prosecutorial misconduct.

We look forward to more disruption to business-as-usual in the coming days.

FIRE JOHN YOO!

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