I’m not a lawyer or anything but I feel like you can draw a pretty direct line from John Yoo being allowed to slip back into the comforts of tenure and the occasional NYT oped to what’s happening with the CECOT and doj
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THIS. I’m a lawyer, and while I was in law school, I wrote a paper about the *wildly* illegal torture and rendition memos written by him and Jay Bybee (don’t let him off the hook, he’s still a federal circuit judge). Yoo came to speak at our school, and protestors were removed from the event.
All these guys simply waited for two terms of Obama to pass and the onset of Trump, and then they slithered back into polite company. But they were providing the legal and political infrastructure for fascism long before January 2017.
A colleague had Yoo as a professor in law school and spoke neutral-to-positive about him. And maybe he's a smart guy and an effective teacher but it opened a pit in my stomach.
Absolutely. If we had done the right thing and hanged Bush 43, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Yoo, and Haynes for war crimes, we probably never even would have had to worry about Trump.
We should have hung the Confederate officers instead of installing them in positions of power post-Civil War. A lot of us wouldn’t be here but the US would be a stronger country now and we wouldn’t have a potus gloating about his American Holocaust in front of reporters.
I was thinking about that this morning. The fact there were no repercussions with the whole illegal "extraordinary rendition" lead to the this by the same bad actors and their acolytes now in power two decades later.
I worked at UC Berkeley when John Yoo's torture memo stuff came out, and part of my job was to open all the donation mail that ppl sent in. Let me tell you there were A LOT of angry solicitations sent back to us with "FIRE JOHN YOO" scrawled across the top. I learned a lot from the letters ppl wrote
From NPR in 2010: "[H]is only regret about the period is the "pressure of time" he had to act under. John Yoo, author of Crisis and Command, also says that his memos' definition of "severe pain" came from a statute that regulates insurance benefits under Medicare."
I’m not a president or anything but I feel you can draw a pretty direct line from Nixon to Reagan to Clinton to Bush to Obama to Trump(45) allowing to get away with overseas violence and/or domestic malfeasance with no accountability to what’s happening now with CECOT, DOJ, NSA, The WH, etc.
He was the key note speaker at my state’s bar conference in like 2013. Everyone wanted to know why the fuck the torture memo guy was invited to speak. We should have stood up and walked out.
Jonh Yoo's position at UC Berkeley Law is the disgraceful counterexample to all the alleged "anti-conservative discrimination" at elite schools. Meanwhile, Yoo has not stopped saying disgraceful things.
I was there then. We protested him. There continued to be posters of his face around town for over a decade, on and off. He is, should be, a pariah. His total abdication of humanity and morality in those memos made me ill then and still now.
Yoo is definitely a signpost between then and now, but the GOP insisting that anybody that ever served a Republican administration (regardless of how illegally they executed that job) be treated as a normie is a long standing tradition.
Take a look at ol’ Ollie North’s cv from like 1991 to present because even if you think you know how easily he was welcomed back into polite company, you probably don’t remember his cameo on the sitcom “Wings”.
Hm, I have no love for Bork, but he was not reponsible for the Saturday Night Massacre. That phrase referrs to the resignation of the AG and deputy AG when they refused Nixon's order to fire the Watergate special prosecutor. Bork took over because he was 3rd in line, not because he got rid of them.
Honestly this is why I kind of have more respect for people who went to some bland state school. You never hear about people from Ball State being linchpins in the rise of fascism.
I got in fights at middle school about the Iraq war. It was 2004. I was like, “they are lying to us and we shouldn’t go to war there” and I was fucking right! At 13!
I remember saying to a friend of mine at the time "Well, they must really have the proof (that Saddam is connected to Al Qaeda) or else they wouldn't risk this politically."
Democrats are complicit. Thanks to the Obama administration, the American military forces can indefinitely detain a US citizen without trial under Section 1021(b) of the NDAA for an ACCUSATION of “aiding” or “supporting” “enemy forces”. All the war criminals work together.
I have frequently said that the moment we started trying to wheedle out of what was clearly torture being torture is the moment that this became inevitable.
Still, it’s interesting to read an affirmative case for shunning so thanks for sharing. I was just talking today with someone about how the union I used to work for still has scab trials and it’s… effective
i had my hopes after january 6 - i published that piece on january 13th. but think tanks, law firms, others just melted to the point where, today, mike pompeo is a fellow at columbia! it was a real strategic error.
it’s so frustrating that there was a real moment that we could have turned towards something better, which was decisive legal action against Trump & co on, like, January 7th
There is no greater crime in the US than for a person with the right pedigree and social standing to suffer actual consequences. They are allowed to act as if every action is some intellectual exercise divorced from real-world consequence.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Bybee
Everyone, I guess.
I remember saying to a friend of mine at the time "Well, they must really have the proof (that Saddam is connected to Al Qaeda) or else they wouldn't risk this politically."
Boy was I naive!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torture_Memos
-- The Tempest / William Shakespeare
Torture corrupts everything it touches
Also Bush PR person Nicolle Wallace agreed. People tend to fail up
https://www.npr.org/2020/01/20/797870699/pre-trial-hearings-set-to-begin-in-case-against-sept-11-terrorists
They are practicing.
And yet there are proclamations that conservatives are pushed out of academia.. they didn’t push out the torture advocate gay Yoo.
I was thinking about John Yoo just yesterday & how this CECOT scheme is more of the same GOP betrayal of core American values.
*runs away real fast*
Now that Yoo is back in the conversation because of the El Salvador torture camps, I'm asking around to see if anyone has a link to that essay.
Thanks in advance for any help!