This will be brief, with no specific links, as I write in haste. Interested readers can easily find -- at
atrios and
buzzflash -- the requisite references to Yoo's sanction for the torture of children, if the president wills it.
Simply put, the man is a danger to the republic, and has no legitimate place in a public university -- more bluntly, California taxpayers should find the means to remove him from the chair he currently occupies in the law school at UC Berkeley.
I am no lawyer, yet I would argue that the use of torture-- in any sort of state sponsored proceeding -- is, in an over-arching sense, judicial. Since the nominal goal is the extraction of guilty information, can anyone then doubt that torture violates the 5th amendment prohibition against self-incrimination?
I understand the dangers of my advocacy. Yoo is a tenured professor at Berkeley, and I am a believer in academic freedom. I also believe in what Lippman called the 'indispensable opposition' -- that is, it is only in the fire of conflict that we forge our own true opinions. Bernard Shaw put another way: "No ever Irishman knows what he is thinking until he is in an argument with another Irishman."
In spite of these qualifying considerations, Yoo has done more than enough damage to American polity in his brief career; and it is time to remove him from the public payroll, particularly in his character as 'Professor of Law.'