The President's Executioner

[seemslikeadream]

http://www.counterpunch.org/vanbergen04242008.html

April 24, 2008
The President's Executioner
The High Crimes of John Yoo
By JENNIFER VAN BERGEN

The title of this article --The President's Executioner --is a play on words. It refers to professor John Yoo, who teaches law at Boalt Hall, University of California, Berkeley. But this man --mild-mannered by all appearances --is not what he seems.

He is the man who was, more often than nearly any other, behind the White House decisions to violate the international laws of war. He was the one who told the White House how to get away with committing war crimes. While he may have been a henchman for others who instructed him to make the arguments he did, he repeatedly refused to reverse himself, both while he worked in the Department of Justice and after he left that office and returned to academia.

But it was also during this time period, as we now know, that the Department of Justice became “politicized.” Instead of executing the laws as it should have been doing, the Justice Department became an instrument of President Bush, executing his wishes. And John Yoo executed White House wishes to twist the law into something it was not and was not meant to be.

Yoo, however, did more than execute orders. The so-called “Torture Memos,” in the writing of which Yoo was an active and primary participant, opened the door to such abuse of the laws that some detainees were actually murdered. For all practical purposes, they were executed, without a trial or guilty verdict.

Thus, the President's Executioner.

Yoo & the Unlimited Executive

Professor Yoo teaches the following courses: International Civil Litigation, International Law, Constitutional Law, Foreign Relations Law, Civil Procedure, International Trade, Separation of Powers Law. These courses cover big issues. They relate not to person-to-person issues, to one family's inheritance, a personal injury lawsuit, or a burglary. Most of the courses Professor Yoo teaches relate to how our country is run and who has the power to do what, internally and internationally.

[The Magistrate]

1. Indeed, Ma'am

Yoo is definitely a proper object for prosecution under both U.S. and international law. He should be in the dock, and at best spend the rest of his days in a prison cell.

[seemslikeadream]

5. Do you believe we will see justice Sir?

Or will this crime wave go unpunished? And leave us all labeled by the world as co-conspirators to this travesty. After all this is a Democracy, are we not responsible?

[The Magistrate]

6. We Must Hope For The Best, Ma'am

The law on the matter is pretty clear. Yoo knowingly advised the breaking of both Federal and international law concerning torture of prisoners, and is in a position precisely analagous to the position of the late Andersen company regarding Enron. If the U.S. government fails to prosecute him, and fails to prosecute those who claim to have acted on his advice, then the U.S. government itself is liable under established doctrines of command responsibility, and opens the door to legitimate prosecutions in other countries under accepted doctrines of universal jurisdiction over violations of international law defining torture.

No legal doctrine would extend 'co-conspirator' status to any ordinary citizen of the United States in this matter, but it is certainly true that our country will be regarded by many people throughout the world, including the rest of the West, as a species of 'rogue state' and an international outlaw.

[seemslikeadream]

8. I didn't mean to suggest we would be "legally" responsible for war crimes

I wonder how long it took for German citizens shame to wear off? Or did that occur right after the Nuremberg trials?

[annabanana]

2. Do you suppose that he is convincing his students that

this misuse of the law is right and correct?

[seemslikeadream]

3. The students should be exercising their power and shut down that school

[The Magistrate]

7. That Would Be A Salutory Spectacle, Ma'am

And a proper and righteous action.

[seemslikeadream]

9. Are you familiar with this book, Sir? If so what are your feelings about it?

Are we "ordinary" Germans?






http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSAKc3fO1Zk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7xiL_kqdTs

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2EtC_RjbCw








US soldiers Lynndie England and boyfriend Charles Graner are charged with multiple counts of assault and cruelty after photos come out of prisoners being humiliated at Abu Ghraib jail in Iraq. Both say they were following orders.

[The Magistrate]

10. In My View, Ma'am, Mr. Goldenhagen Overstates His Case A Bit

And in any case, the item has little relevance to the present case.

There is certainly something to the view that long standing and deeply rooted cultural traditions of hate for Jews in Christendom shaped the minds of many to a form apt for the project of exterminating Jewry that Hitler took up, but there was nothing inevitable about it, and certainly nothing peculiarly German about it.

The Hitlerite crimes do not bear directly on any other event in modern history, and indeed do not bear close comparison even with High Medieval crimes against Europe's Jews. The industrialized extermination of a people, in facilities expressly designed for the purpose, and with no other motivation than their murder, is a unique event. It differs in character from mass killings incidental to mustering slave labor, such as marked various Communist regimes, or mass deaths incidental to enforcement of wrong-headed policies of economic or social reconstruction, or mass deaths incidental to the prosecution of warfare in a clumsy manner.

The crimes the present regime of our country has certainly committed consist in the torture of prisoners. This is a very general thing, committed by thousands of regimes throughout history, and by hundreds in recent times, and dozens certainly in the present day. There is nothing peculiar to Nazi practice in this crime, though certainly it was one crime committed by the Nazi regime, and raising the specter of Nazism in discussion of it clouds the issue greatly.

[seemslikeadream]

11. Do you believe this Iraq war is an illegal one?

Is it possible that papal advisers forgot to tell him that the post-WWII Nuremberg Tribunal described an unprovoked war of aggression, of the kind that the Third Reich and George W. Bush launched, as the “supreme international crime, differing from other war crimes only in that it contains the accumulated evil of the whole?”

Could they have failed to tell the pope he would be hobnobbing with war criminals, torturers and the enabling cowards in Congress who refuse to remove them from office?

For this Catholic, it was a profoundly sad spectacle – profoundly sad.

Not since WWII, when the Reich’s bishops swore personal oaths of allegiance to Hitler (as did the German Supreme Court and army generals) have the papacy and bishops acted in such a fawning, un-Christ-like way.

With very few exceptions, the bishops (Catholic and Evangelical Lutheran) collaborated with the Nazis. Meanwhile, Hamlet-like Pius XII kept trying to make up his mind as to whether he should put the Catholic Church at some risk, while Jews were being murdered by the thousands.


http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article19793.htm

[The Magistrate]

12. Decent Arguments Can Be Made On Both Sides, Ma'am

It is not a settled question. Perhaps some day a competent court will rule on it.

The matter of torturing prisoners is clear-cut as these things get, and of much more use in political life. It is simple, readily understandable, and abhorent to a great many of our citizens, who view it as contrary to what they have always believed this country to be, and to stand for in the world. Those who defend it take a greater political risk than those who denounce it. McCain is particularly vulnerable on the question, as his support for the administration's crimes here amounts to saying the North Vietnamese acted properly in their treatment of him when he was in their custody.

[sinkingfeeling]

4. Would be interesting to be a student in one of his classes. Wonder if he writes the text himself.

The slant on his International Law, Constitutional Law, Foreign Relations Law, and Separation of Powers Law must be widely different from that taught in other law schools.