John Yoo

John Yoo was an untenured professor at Berkeley when he became a clerk for Clarence Thomas and squash partner for Antonin Scalia. He returned to Berkeley and got tenure in 1999. He was involved with the American Enterprise Institute and became a friend of now-U.S. United Nations Ambassador John R. Bolton, whose contempt for international law is well known. He testified to the Florida legislature during the 2000 presidential election recount. From 2001 to 2003 he worked for the Justice Department.

"In a series of opinions," said the Washington Post, "Yoo argued that the Constitution grants the president virtually unhindered discretion in wartime. He said the fight against terrorism, with no fixed battlefield or uniformed enemy, was a new kind of war. Two weeks after Sept. 11, Yoo said in a memo for the White House that the Constitution conferred 'plenary,' or absolute, authority to use force abroad, 'especially in response to grave national emergencies created by sudden, unforeseen attacks on the people and territory of the United States." Yoo's Sept. 25, 2001, memo said"the President's broad constitutional power to use military force to defend the Nation, recognized by the Joint Resolution itself, would allow the President to take whatever actions he deems appropriate to pre-empt or respond to terrorist threats from new quarters." . He advised the White House that the Geneva Conventions do not apply to al Qaeda or the terrorism fight."

In a December 2005 Chicago debate, wrote Washington Post reporter Peter Sleven, "Notre Dame professor and international human rights scholar Doug Cassel said, '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?' 'No treaty,' Yoo replied. 'And also no law by Congress,' Cassel said, 'That is what you wrote in the August 2002 memo.' 'I think,' said Yoo, 'it depends on why the President thinks he needs to do that.'"...[Open in new window]

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How crazy are they?

Pretty damned crazy.

It all needs to come out.

And then charges...trials...sentences. Silence is death.

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