NO TO TORTURE!
FIRE AND DIS-BAR
JOHN YOO!
A battle is taking shape around torture.
John Yoo is the legal architect of the Bush Regime’s torture policies.
While working as Deputy Assistant Attorney General for the Bush administration’s Office of Legal Counsel, wrote the legal justification for torture and providing immunity for the torturers. Under his direction, if George Bush declares someone to be an “enemy combatant,” the person can be snatched from their home in the middle of the night, thrown in a dungeon somewhere in the world, and tortured – with no right to a lawyer and no habeas corpus.
“John Yoo’s complicity in establishing the policy that led to the torture of prisoners constitutes a war crime under the U.S. War Crimes Act,” according to testimony in Congress on May 6 by National Lawyers Guild President Marjorie Cohn.
John Yoo can not be allowed to remain a professor at the University of California Berkeley Law School (Boalt Hall). The issue is not John Yoo’s “academic freedom” but the gruesome reality of torture that he helped to facilitate. By the Nuremberg standards, John Yoo is a war criminal and must be dealt with accordingly. He can not be allowed to continue teaching at a leading law school.
200 Protest: Fire/Disbar/Prosecute John Yoo at U C Berkeley Law School Graduation
As thousands of friends and family members of graduates, and then Boalt Hall Dean Edley and the graduates themselves, filed into the stadium, World Can't Wait, National Lawyers Guild members, Act Against Torture, and many others called on them to wear orange and take a stand on this important occasion -- not only against torture, but against the normalization and acceptance of war criminals on a supposedly liberal campus. Inside the graduation, two UC students unfurled a banner calling for Yoo to be fired. Protesters called on the students to use this opportunity to go out into the world and right a terrible wrong, to take their degree and use it to prosecute John Yoo for war crimes! See coverage in San Francisco Chronicle.
We need to spread the resistance coast to coast. If you are a lawyer or law student, if you have friends who are, if you want to reach out broadly around this, contact us as soon as possible.
One place to go right now is the graduation of the NYU Law School, this Wednesday at the WaMu Theater, Madison Square Garden. We would like to leaflet and engage, calling on people to join in demanding John Yoo's firing and zero tolerance for torture and those who orchestrate it.
Meet at 9:00 AM, 4 Penn Plaza (31st Street & 8th Avenue). Contact us to let us know you're coming at 347-678-5905.
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