JOHN YOO News:

John C Yoo - Torture- War Crimes - Criminal - Military - Intelligence - Law - Language - Politics - Terrorism - Government - Prisoners - Human Rights - California - Indiana - "Permissible Assaults Cited in Graphic Detail." ... "Thirty pages into a memorandum discussing the legal boundaries of military interrogations in 2003, senior [Republican President Bush's deputy Office of Legal Counsel] Justice Department lawyer John C. Yoo tackled a question not often asked by American policymakers: Could the president, if he desired, have a prisoner's eyes poked out?" ... "Or, for that matter, could he have "scalding water, corrosive acid or caustic substance" thrown on a prisoner? How about slitting an ear, nose or lip, or disabling a tongue or limb? What about biting?" ... "These assaults are all mentioned in a U.S. [United States] law prohibiting maiming, which Yoo parsed as he clarified the legal outer limits of what could be done to terrorism suspects as detained by U.S. authorities. The specific prohibitions, he said, depended on the circumstances or which "body part the statute specifies."" ... "But none of that matters in a time of war, Yoo also said, because federal laws prohibiting assault, maiming and other crimes by military interrogators are trumped by the president's ultimate authority as commander in chief." ... "It [Yoo's memorandum] repeats an assertion in another controversial Yoo memo that an interrogation tactic cannot be considered torture unless it would result in "death, organ failure or serious impairment of bodily functions."" ... "Yoo, who is now a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley [California], also uses footnotes to effectively dismiss the Fourth and Fifth amendments to the Constitution, arguing that protections against unreasonable search and seizure and guarantees of due process either do not apply or are irrelevant in a time of war." ... "Written opinions by the Office of Legal Counsel have the force of law within the government because its staff is assigned to interpret the meaning of statutory or constitutional language. Yoo's 2003 memo has evoked strong criticism from legal academics, human rights advocates and military-law experts, who say that he was wrong on basic matters of constitutional law and went too far in authorizing harsh and coercive interrogation tactics by the Defense Department." ... ""Having 81 pages of legal analysis with its footnotes and respectable-sounding language makes the reader lose sight of what this is all about," said Dawn Johnsen, an OLC chief during the [Democratic President Bill] Clinton administration who is now a law professor at Indiana University [Indiana]. "He is saying that poking people's eyes out and pouring acid on them is beyond Congress's ability to limit a president. It is an unconscionable document."" -By Dan Eggen -WashingtonPost

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Noteworthy - Media - John Yoo - Mike Mukasey - Torture - Lawbreaking - Surveillance - Military - Intelligence - Terrorism - Political - Enforcement - Barack Obama - Pennsylvania - US - Iraq - "The U.S. establishment media in a nutshell." ... "In the past two weeks, the following events transpired. A Department of Justice memo, authored by John Yoo, was released which authorized torture and presidential lawbreaking. It was revealed that the [Republican President Bush] Bush administration declared the Fourth Amendment of the Bill of Rights to be inapplicable to "domestic military operations" within the U.S. [United States] The U.S. Attorney General [Michael Mukasey] appears to have fabricated a key event leading to the 9/11 attacks and made patently false statements about surveillance laws and related lawsuits. Barack Obama went bowling in Pennsylvania and had a low score." ... "Here are the number of times, according to NEXIS, that various topics have been mentioned in the media over the past thirty days:" ... ""Yoo and torture" - 102" ... ""Mukasey and 9/11" -- 73" ... ""Yoo and Fourth Amendment" -- 16" ... ""Obama and bowling" -- 1,043" ... ""Obama and Wright" -- More than 3,000 (too many to be counted)" ... ""Obama and patriotism" - 1,607" ... ""Clinton and Lewinsky" -- 1,079" ... "And as Eric Boehlert documents, even Iraq -- that little five-year U.S. occupation with no end in sight -- has been virtually written out of the media narrative in favor of mindless, stupid, vapid chatter of the type referenced above." ... "Think about it this way: if you were a high government official and watched as -- all in a couple of weeks time -- it is revealed, right out in the open, that you suspended the Fourth Amendment, authorized torture, proclaimed yourself empowered to break the law, and sent the nation's top law enforcement officer to lie blatantly about how and why the 9/11 attacks happened so that you could acquire still more unchecked spying power and get rid of lawsuits that would expose what you did, and the political press in this country basically ignored all of that and blathered on about Obama's bowling score and how he eats chocolate, wouldn't you also conclude that you could do anything you want, without limits, and know there will be no consequences? What would be the incentive to stop doing all of that?" -By Glenn Greenwald -Salon

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John Yoo - Alberto Gonzales - Surveillance - Military - Government - Terrorism - Intelligence - Politics - Secret - Law - History - Liberties - "Memo Justified Warrantless Surveillance." ... "For at least 16 months after the Sept. [September] 11 terror attacks in 2001, the [Republican President] Bush administration believed that the Constitution's protection against unreasonable searches and seizures on U.S. [United States] soil didn't apply to its efforts to protect against terrorism." ... "That view was expressed in a Justice Department legal memo dated Oct. [October] 23, 2001. The administration on Wednesday stressed that it now disavows that view." ... "The October 2001 memo was written at the request of the [Republican President Bush] White House by John Yoo, then the deputy assistant attorney general, and addressed to Alberto Gonzales, the White House counsel at the time. The administration had asked the department for an opinion on the legality of potential responses to terrorist activity." ... "The 37-page memo has not been released. Its existence was disclosed Tuesday in a footnote of a separate secret memo, dated March 14, 2003, released by the Pentagon in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union." ... ""Our office recently concluded that the Fourth Amendment had no application to domestic military operations," the footnote states, referring to a document titled "Authority for Use of Military Force to Combat Terrorist Activities Within the United States."" ... "Exactly what domestic military action was covered by the October memo is unclear. But federal documents indicate that the memo relates to the National Security Agency's Terrorist Surveillance Program, or TSP." -By Pamela Hess and Lara Jakes Jordan -AP via -SFGate.com 

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John Yoo - Gonzales - Cheney - Addington - War Crimes - Criminal - Torture - Military - Intelligence - Terrorism - Political - Law - Secret - Government - History - Civil Liberties - California - US - Guantanamo - Cuba - Iraq - Prisons - "John Yoo's war crimes." ... "As the result of a FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] lawsuit the ACLU [American Civil Liberties Union] filed and then prosecuted for several years, numerous documents relating to the [Republican President] Bush administration's torture regime that have long been baselessly kept secret were released yesterday, including an 81-pagememorandum (.pdf) issued in 2003 by then-Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo (currently a Berkeley [California] Law Professor) which asserted that the President's war powers entitle him to ignore multiple laws which criminalized the use of torture:"

"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 Qaeda 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."

[ Listen to John Yoo interview: "Cassel: If the president deems that he's got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person's child, there is no law that can stop him?" ... "Yoo: No treaty." ... "Cassel: Also no law by Congress -- that is what you wrote in the August 2002 memo..." ... "Yoo: I think it depends on why the President thinks he needs to do that."]

""[T]he experience of our wars," Winthrop 839, is rife with evidence that establishes beyond any doubt that conspiracy to violate the laws of war is itself an offense cognizable before a law-of-war military commission. . . . . In [World War II], the orders establishing the jurisdiction of military commissions in various theaters of operation provided that conspiracy to violate the laws of war was a cognizable offense. See Letter, General Headquarters, United States Army Forces, Pacific (Sept. 24, 1945), Record in Yamashita v. Styer, O. T. 1945, No. 672, pp. 14, 16 (Exh. F) (Order respecting the "Regulations Governing the Trial of War Criminals" provided that "participation in a common plan or conspiracy to accomplish" various offenses against the law of war was cognizable before military commissions)."

John Yoo - Torture - Lawyers - Political - History - "The Legality of Evil: The Torture Memos and the Living Constitution." ... "Lawyers can make really bad legal arguments that argue for very unjust things in perfectly legal sounding language. I hope nobody is surprised by this fact. It is very commonplace. Today we are talking about lawyers making arguments defending the legality of torture. In the past lawyers have used legal sounding arguments to defend slavery, the genocide of Native Americans, rape (both spousal and non-spousal), Jim Crow, police brutality, denials of habeas corpus, destruction or seizure of property, and compulsory sterilization." ... "Orin [Kerr] wants to know whether John's [John Yoo's torture memorandum] theories are consistent with my views of the living constitution. If he wants to know as a substantive matter whether John's theories of Presidential dictatorship are consistent with the Constitution's text and underlying principles, they are not." -By Jack Balkin -Balkinization

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John Yoo - Gonzales - Haynes - Addington - Criminal - Torture - Lawyers - Military - Government - Terrorism - Intelligence - Politics - History - Book - US - International - Guantánamo - Cuba - Iraq - "The Green Light." ... "Yesterday the public finally got to see the full text of an infamous Department of Justice memorandum from March 2003 designed to authorize torture. I will have some more comments on this odious document authored by John Yoo, a man who (amazingly) teaches at a prominent law school. But this disclosure serves as a fitting introduction for the publication today of Philippe Sands’s article “The Green Light” in Vanity Fair. The article is a teaser for Sands’s forthcoming book, set for release later this month, The Torture Team." ... "We’ve all heard ad nauseam the [Republican President Bush] Administration’s official torture narrative. This is a different kind of war, they argue. Each invocation of “different” is to a clear point: the [Republican President Bush] Administration wishes to pursue its war unfettered by the laws of war. Unfettered, indeed, by any form or notion of law. But Sands’s work is important because he has looked carefully at the chronology: what came first, the decision to use torture techniques, or the legal rationale for them?"

"[Alberto] Gonzales and [William] Haynes laid out their case with considerable care. The only flaw was that every element of the argument contained untruths. The real story, pieced together from many hours of interviews with most of the people involved in the decisions about interrogation, goes something like this: The Geneva decision was not a case of following the logic of the law but rather was designed to give effect to a prior decision to take the gloves off and allow coercive interrogation; it deliberately created a legal black hole into which the detainees were meant to fall. The new interrogation techniques did not arise spontaneously from the field but came about as a direct result of intense pressure and input from Rumsfeld’s office. The Yoo-[Jay]Bybee Memo was not simply some theoretical document, an academic exercise in blue-sky hypothesizing, but rather played a crucial role in giving those at the top the confidence to put pressure on those at the bottom. And the practices employed at Guantánamo [Cuba] led to abuses at Abu Ghraib [Iraq]." ... "The fingerprints of the most senior lawyers in the administration were all over the design and implementation of the abusive interrogation policies. [David] Addington, Bybee, Gonzales, Haynes, and Yoo became, in effect, a torture team of lawyers, freeing the administration from the constraints of all international rules prohibiting abuse."

John C Yoo - Criminal - Torture - War Crimes - Military - Intelligence - Terrorism - Law - Psychology - Drugs - Federal - Secrets - Prison - US - Iraq - Afghanistan - Foreign - Politics - History - "Memo: Laws Didn't Apply to Interrogators: Justice Dept. [Department] Official in 2003 Said President's Wartime Authority Trumped Many Statutes." ... "The Justice Department sent a legal memorandum to the Pentagon in 2003 asserting that federal laws prohibiting assault, maiming and other crimes did not apply to military interrogators who questioned al-Qaeda captives because the president's ultimate authority as commander in chief overrode such statutes." ... "The 81-page memo, which was declassified and released publicly yesterday, argues that poking, slapping or shoving detainees would not give rise to criminal liability. The document also appears to defend the use of mind-altering drugs that do not produce "an extreme effect" calculated to "cause a profound disruption of the senses or personality."" ... "Although the existence of the memo has long been known, its contents had not been previously disclosed." ... "Nine months after it was issued, Justice Department officials told the Defense Department to stop relying on it. But its reasoning provided the legal foundation for the Defense Department's use of aggressive interrogation practices at a crucial time, as captives poured into military jails from Afghanistan and U.S. [United States] forces prepared to invade Iraq." ... "Sent to the Pentagon's general counsel on March 14, 2003, by John C. Yoo, then a deputy in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, the memo provides an expansive argument for nearly unfettered presidential power in a time of war. It contends that numerous laws and treaties forbidding torture or cruel treatment should not apply to U.S. interrogations in foreign lands because of the president's inherent wartime powers." ... ""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 Qaeda terrorist network," Yoo wrote. "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."" ... "Interrogators who harmed a prisoner would be protected by a "national and international version of the right to self-defense," Yoo wrote. He also articulated a definition of illegal conduct in interrogations -- that it must "shock the conscience" -- that the [Republican President] Bush administration advocated for years." ... ""Whether conduct is conscience-shocking turns in part on whether it is without any justification," Yoo wrote, explaining, for example, that it would have to be inspired by malice or sadism before it could be prosecuted." ... "Thomas J. Romig, who was then the Army's judge advocate general, said yesterday after reading the memo that it appears to argue there are no rules in a time of war, a concept Romig found "downright offensive."" (1, 2) -By Dan Eggen and Josh White with contributions by Julie Tate -WashingtonPost

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