John Yoo

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John Choon Yoo (born 1967), a professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law (Boalt Hall). A Korean-born American, he is best known for his work from 2001 to 2003 in the United States Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel.[1]

He contributed to the PATRIOT Act and wrote controversial memos in which he advocated the possible legality of torture and that enemy combatants could be denied protection under the Geneva Conventions.[2]

Contents

[edit] Biography

As an infant, Yoo emigrated with his parents from South Korea to the United States. He grew up in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and graduated from Harvard University in 1989 and Yale Law School in 1992. Yoo clerked for United States Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit Judge Laurence Silberman. From 1995 to 1996 he was general counsel for the Senate Judiciary Committee. He is currently a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

[edit] Legal work

Yoo's academic work includes analysis of the history of judicial review in the U.S. Constitution. (See discussion in the Marbury v. Madison entry.) Yoo's book The Powers of War and Peace : The Constitution and Foreign Affairs after 9/11 has enjoyed critical praise from the Washington Times, which likened it to The Prince. It was cited during the Senate hearings for U.S. Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito by Senator Joseph Biden.

After he left the Department of Justice, it was revealed that Yoo authored memos defining torture and American habeas corpus obligations narrowly.[3] Protestors at Berkeley demanded, to no avail, that he renounce the memos or resign his professorship. Yoo, citing the classified nature of the matter, has declined to confirm or deny reports that he authored the position that the President had sufficient power to allow the NSA to monitor the communications of US citizens on US soil without a warrant, i.e. NSA warrantless surveillance controversy.[4]

[edit] War Crimes Prosecution

In November, 2006, the German government received a complaint seeking the prosecution of Mr. Yoo for alleged war crimes. The complaint alleges that during his tenure as U.S. deputy assistant attorney general from 2001 to 2003, Mr. Yoo (along with co-defendant Jay Bybee) was the "legal architect" of the U.S. torture programs. [1]

Other co-defendants include: Donald H. Rumsfeld, George Tenet, Stephen Cambone, Ricardo S. Sanchez, Geoffrey Miller, Walter Wojdakowski, Thomas M. Pappas, Barbara Fast, Marc Warren, Alberto Gonzales, William J. Haynes, II, David Addington, and Jay Bybee.

The legal precedent for the prosecution of Mr. Yoo and his co-defendant lawyers is the American prosecution of German jurists whose legal work was complicit in Nazi atrocities. See United States of America vs. Josef Altstötter, et. al., 6 Law Reports of Trials of War Criminals 1 (1947)(U.S.M.T. Nuremberg), commonly referred to as the Judges' Trial or the Justice Trial. In 1947, the American military tribunal at Nuremberg convicted a group of lawyers for complicity in international crimes for their role in enacting and enforcing laws and decrees that permitted crimes against humanity, including torture. None of the defendants in the Judges’ Trial were charged with a crime against a particular person. They were charged with complicity in an organized system of cruelty, which they had fostered in their role as lawyers. “The dagger of the assassin was concealed beneath the robe of the jurist.” [2]

On 14th November 2006, German attorney Wolfgang Kaleck filed the complaint with the German Federal Attorney General (Generalbundesanwalt) against Mr. Yoo for his complicity in torture and other crimes against humanity at Abu Ghraib in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Mr. Kaleck acts on behalf of 11 victims of torture and other human rights abuses, as well as about 30 human rights activists and organizations who are co-plaintiffs. The co-plaintiffs to the war crimes prosecution include: 1980 Nobel Peace Prize winner Adolfo Pérez Esquivel (Argentine), 2002 Nobel Peace Prize winner Martín Almada (Paraguay), Theo van Boven, the former United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture, Sister Dianna Ortiz (Torture survivor, Executive Director of TASSC), and Veterans for Peace. [3]

[edit] Unitary Executive

Yoo contends that the Congressional check on Presidential war making power comes from its power of the purse. Yoo also contends that the President, and not the Congress or courts, has sole authority to interpret international treaties such as the Geneva Convention "because treaty interpretation is a key feature of the conduct of foreign affairs".[5] His positions on executive power, collectively termed the Yoo Doctrine or Unitary Executive theory, are controversial since it is suggested the theory holds that the President's war powers place him above any law.[5][6] [7][8] [9]

In explaining the Yoo Doctrine, Yoo made the following statements during a December 1, 2005, debate in Chicago, Illinois, with Notre Dame Law School Professor Doug Cassel:

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.[10]

He has criticized traditional views on the Separation of Powers doctrine as problematic for the Global War on Terrorism, for instance stating:[4]

   
“
 We are used to a peacetime system in which Congress enacts the laws, the president enforces them, and the courts interpret them. In wartime, the gravity shifts to the executive branch.
   
”

and

   
“
 To his critics, Mr. Bush is a “King George” bent on an “imperial presidency.” But the inescapable fact is that war shifts power to the branch most responsible for its waging: the executive.
   
”

[5]

[edit] Works

Yoo has authored two recent books.

  • The Powers Of War And Peace: The Constitution And Foreign Affairs After 9/11 (ISBN 0-226-96031-5). University of Chicago Press, 2005.
  • War by Other Means: An Insider's Account of the War on Terror (ISBN 0-87113-945-6). Atlantic Monthly Press, forthcoming August or September 2006.

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ A Junior Aide Had a Big Role in Terror Policy, New York Times, December 23, 2005
  2. ^ Torture and Accountability, The Nation, June 28, 2005; Parsing pain, Salon (magazine), February 23, 2006; U.S. Officials Misstate Geneva Convention Requirements , Human Rights Watch, January 28, 2002;Findings Report: Enemy Combatants and the Geneva Conventions, Council on Foreign Relations, December 12, 2002; Memos Reveal War Crimes Warnings, MSNBC, May 19, 2004; The New CIA Gulag of Secret Foreign Prisons: Why it Violates Both Domestic and International Law, Findlaw, November 7, 2005;US Lawyers Warn Bush on War Crimes, Global Policy, January 28, 2003.
  3. ^ Double Standards?, MSNBC, May 15, 2005
  4. ^ Bush Authorized Domestic Spying: Post-9/11 Order Bypassed Special Court, Washington Post, December 16, 2005
  5. ^ a b An interview with John Yoo: author of The Powers of War and Peace: The Constitution and Foreign Affairs after 9/11
  6. ^ A Wunnerful, Wunnerful Constitution, John Yoo Notwithstanding, After Downing Street, December 9, 2005
  7. ^ The Unitary Executive in the Modern Era, 1945-2001 (.pdf), Vanderbilt University
  8. ^ Meek, mild and menacing, Salon (magazine), January 12, 2006
  9. ^ The End of 'Unalienable Rights', Consortiumnews, January 24, 2006
  10. ^ Cassell-Yoo exchange, January 8, 2006 (mp3 audio file)

[edit] External links

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