Protesting Yoo In Berkeley

They gather every Thursday afternoon outside UC Berkeley's Boalt School of Law, usually no more than a dozen committed souls, displaying enlarged photos of detainees who have been tortured by American soldiers and handing out flyers to mostly uninterested passersby.

It’s a telling sign of our times, this small protest over ongoing atrocities that have been strongly condemned by most world leaders. After all, Berkeley students were once at the forefront of condemning human rights abuses and other excesses of imperialism. But today the school employs the architect of the US torture policy, and few of its students raise a peep.

The target of the protest is John Yoo, a law professor here since 1993 who went to work for the Bush administration after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Yoo authored the infamous "torture memo" in 2002 that served as the legal justification for policies allowing American troops to indefinitely detain and illegally torture those the president dubs "enemy combatants." And that was just one memo in a series of position papers Yoo has written arguing that the United States has an almost unlimited right to launch preemptive wars, during which Congress has little authority to oversee the decisions of the president.

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