Posted on behalf of David Swanson at AfterDowningStreet.org, who is busy working to stop the War Supplemental Appropriations bill (more here.)
New York Times:
A federal judge has ruled that John Yoo, a former Bush administration lawyer who wrote crucial memorandums justifying harsh interrogation techniques, will have to answer in court to accusations that his work led to a prisoner’s being tortured and deprived of his constitutional rights. The government had asked Judge Jeffrey S. White of Federal District Court in San Francisco to dismiss the case filed by Jose Padilla, an American citizen who spent more than three years in a military brig as an enemy combatant. Judge White denied most elements of Mr. Yoo’s motion and quoted a passage from the Federalist Papers that in times of war, nations, to be more safe, "at length become willing to run the risk of being less free."
John Yoo: Professor of Law at Boalt Hall School of Law in Berkeley, California, with house at 1241 Grizzly Peak, Berkeley, (UPDATE: Chased out of Berkeley and now at Chapman), (but a lawyer with the Pennsylvania bar from which he should be debarred and would be if enough people demanded it) counseled the White House on how to get away with war crimes, wrote this memo promoting presidential power to launch aggressive war, and claimed the power to decree that the federal statutes against torture, assault, maiming, and stalking do not apply to the military in the conduct of the war, and to announce a new definition of torture limiting it to acts causing intense pain or suffering equivalent to pain associated with serious physical injury so severe that death, organ failure or permanent damage resulting in loss of significant body functions will likely result. Yoo claimed in 2005 that a president has the right to enhance an interrogation by crushing the testicles of someone's child.
Judge's comment on Rove's citizen arrest in Iowa: "It's about time."
EMAIL THIS POST TO YOUR CONGRESSMAN, "PLEASE APPOINT A SPECIAL PROSECUTOR.". EMAIL THIS POST TO THE WHITE HOUSE. "PLEASE APPOINT A SPECIAL PROSECUTOR."
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Testicle-Crusher Yoo: