Yoo Must Face Torture Lawsuit

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Registered: 03-18-2000
Yoo Must Face Torture Lawsuit
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Sun, 06-14-2009 - 10:12am

Yoo, Bush Administration Lawyer, Must Face Torture Lawsuit


http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=avT0.R96jAFI


John Yoo, a ex-Justice Department attorney who wrote memos justifying harsh interrogations of terrorism detainees, lost his bid to dismiss a lawsuit blaming him for alleged violations of a detainee’s rights.


Jose Padilla, convicted last year of supporting terrorists and conspiring to commit murder, was detained for three years as an enemy combatant in the U.S., where he claims he was subjected to physical abuse.


He sued Yoo, who wrote in advisory memos for the Bush administration that terrorism suspects weren’t protected by Geneva Convention bans on physical abuse. Padilla claimed Yoo created a system of torture. U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White denied most of Yoo’s motion to dismiss the case, saying even enemy combatants are protected by the U.S. Constitution.


“Like any other government official, government lawyers are responsible for the foreseeable consequences of their conduct,” White wrote in the ruling yesterday. “The specific designation as an enemy combatant does not automatically eviscerate all of the constitutional protections afforded to a citizen of the United States.”


Yoo, now a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, is represented in the case by the Justice Department. Matthew Miller, a department spokesman, declined to comment on the ruling.


Jonathan Freiman, an attorney for Padilla, didn’t immediately respond to a voice-mail message left after regular business hours yesterday.


Coercive Interrogations


Padilla claims that Yoo’s memos led to a system under which he was subject to coercive interrogations and cruel and unusual punishment while being denied his right to an attorney, access to courts, freedom of religion and due process.


Yoo argued that, as a government official, he was immune to such lawsuits. He didn’t personally participate in Padilla’s treatment and decisions about the government’s conduct during war should be decided by the president and Congress, he said.


Padilla asked for $1 in damages and court order declaring his treatment illegal and unconstitutional.


White dismissed Padilla’s allegation that his right against self-incrimination was violated and said Padilla could amend his lawsuit to add information to support that claim.


The case is Padilla v. Yoo, 08-00035, U.S. District Court, Northern District of California (San Francisco).


 

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Photobucket&nbs

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-03-2009
Sun, 06-14-2009 - 1:53pm

Wonderful! High bleeping time.

Yoo was one of the most active proponents of "enhanced interrogation techniques. I watched him in interviews on PBS NewsHour in 2003, 2004, 2005. Smart, well-spoken, and unscrupulous; willing to use any means to justify the ends he supports, regardless of constitutionality or morality. Very much into authoritarianism as his membership in the American Enterprise Institute illustrates. Also fond of RHIP* and double standards for those in the lower echelons of the military: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/middle_east/jan-june04/interrogation_05-13.html

Scary, very scary when he was given so much latitude and his beliefs became regime policy. Here's an interview he gave Frontline: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/torture/interviews/yoo.html

*Rank Hath Its Privileges

Jabberwocka

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-23-2003
Sun, 06-14-2009 - 2:27pm

Thanks for posting those links...I had been looking for them.


Yes, it's about time!



iVillage Member
Registered: 03-18-2000
Mon, 06-15-2009 - 8:41am

Interesting interviews.


Instead of declaring war it's seems a better way of handling this would have been through the courts. This has been accomplished before in the case of the first bombing of the Towers. Even if secret military op's &/or the CIA/FBI were involved in capturing the guilty if would have been more expeditious than sending in forces IMO. (Iraq I wont even go there.)


This is an interesting & revealing part of the interview.....


>"There was, as you suggest, going back to the Reagan administration, a kind of philosophy, ... a new way that America was beginning to think in the world.


Sort of an American exceptionalism.


Is that would you'd call it?


Yeah, that's sort of what sociologists call it, American exceptionalism, Americans thinking they're different, that the United States is a force for good in the world… There's this idea that go all the way back to the founding of the country.


I say I think certainly when the administration came in, it was more reluctant to get entangled in certain international commitments and international institutions to the same extent the Clinton administration had. So the United States de-signs the International Criminal Court Treaty and statute of limitations. It turns the ABM Treaty, doesn't go forward with Kyoto .


I guess I'd say there's more confidence in the United States being able to, on an ad hoc basis, cooperate with individual nations but not wanting to make it permanent........"<


Torture has been conducted in similar fashions at Gitmo, in Afghanistan, Iraq & God only knows what has been done to prisoners in secret

 


Photobucket&nbs

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-03-2009
Mon, 06-15-2009 - 9:40am

I doubt that we would have been willing to pursue Osama bin Ladin by way of courts and international law. In hindsight, your idea has great merit but most of us were shocked, then scared, then furious in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.

IF more assets and resources had been spent on capturing OBL, perhaps all of the Middle East mess would have had a different outcome. Just think. Ahmadinejad might not have been elected AT ALL. I firmly believe that the "axis of evil" spew had the result of alarming and then ramping up defensive behavior in Iraq, Iran and North Korea. Iraq was low-hanging fruit--but even with all our might and power, BushCo blew it there. So many ways in which the whole situation there would have been different, almost certainly in far more positive ways than became the case.

Yoo has a lot to answer for* in his enabling of torture and endorsement of "unitary president" powers (including warrantless wire taps), though he may be enough of a sociopath to simply not see the huge folly of his thinking or the harm it has done.
<<"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?" "No treaty," replied John Yoo, the former justice department official who wrote the crucial memos justifying President Bush's policies on torture, detainees and domestic surveillance without warrants.
Yoo publicly debated last month the radical notion of the "unitary executive" - that the president, as commander-in-chief, is sole judge of the law, unbound by hindrances such as the Geneva conventions, and has inherent authority to subordinate independent government agencies to his fiat. This is the cornerstone of the Bush legal doctrine.
Yoo's interlocutor, Douglass Cassel, a professor at the Notre Dame law school, pointed out that the theory of the unitary executive posits the president above other branches of government: "Also no law by Congress. That is what you wrote in the August 2002 memo."
"I think it depends on why the president thinks he needs to do that," said Yoo.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2006/jan/12/usa.comment

The only good thing to come out of the arrogance and ineptitude of BushCo was the demise of the neocons and their "my way or the highway" "American exceptionalism"/PNAC crud. They did their things their way and we've been ruing and paying ever since.

Alas, we have abysmally short memories and there's a real chance they may return in some other guise, some other "idea", some other name. Speaking of lessons in history, today is the anniversary of the signing of the Magna Carta.

*Along with Bush, Cheney, Perle, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld,.....

Jabberwocka

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-18-2000
Mon, 06-15-2009 - 9:41am

CIA Interrogation Contractors Fired


http://voices.washingtonpost.com/government-inc/2009/06/interrogation_contractors_fire.html?wprss=government-inc


We have known for awhile now that the intelligence community spends up to 70 percent of its budget on contractors. That includes the firms that supply light bulbs, the office chairs and such.


It also includes legions of analysts, who have been hired to examine "open source" content on the Web, along with much other material from around the world.


Now comes another story to remind us how integral contractors have become to the nation's security infrastructure.


"Weeks after President Obama took office, the Central Intelligence Agency extended its contract with a firm run by two psychologists who helped introduce waterboarding and other harsh methods to the agency's interrogation techniques, according to a news report.


"Two months later, CIA Director Leon Panetta fired Mitchell, Jessen & Associates and all other contractors that aided the CIA in its interrogations of alleged terrorists, the New Yorker reported this weekend."


That was from our colleague Walter Pincus. It's a strange experience reading a story with such creepy implications. It's worth keeping track of these kinds of arrangements, both from a contracting perspective, and from the larger perspective of what limits our country will observe in our war on terror.


Are contractors used in these kinds of situations to fuzz out lines of responsibility and accountability?


In the New Yorker, Panetta said he "'didn't support these methods that were used, or the legal justification for why they did it. He also said he supported at one time the creation of a 'truth commission' to look into the subject. But after Obama said in late April that he did not want to look as if he was going after either former president George W. Bush or former vice president Richard B. Cheney, Panetta said, 'everyone kind of backed away from it.'"


Does that mean the president is backing away from getting to the bottom of it because of political concerns? If so, is that the right way to go?

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Photobucket&nbs

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-03-2009
Mon, 06-15-2009 - 10:19am

Yeah, he's backing away. Makes me spitting mad.

Key Democrats were either aware and didn't speak out or actually complicit--kinda like most were at the onset of war in Iraq. They're protesting otherwise but sure don't want any sun shining on the darker corners of what they did or enabled.

"...long before "waterboarding" entered the public discourse, the CIA gave key legislative overseers about 30 private briefings, some of which included descriptions of that technique and other harsh interrogation methods, according to interviews with multiple U.S. officials with firsthand knowledge.
With one known exception, no formal objections were raised by the lawmakers briefed about the harsh methods during the two years in which waterboarding was employed, from 2002 to 2003, said Democrats and Republicans with direct knowledge of the matter. The lawmakers who held oversight roles during the period included Pelosi and Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.) and Sens. Bob Graham (D-Fla.) and John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), as well as Rep. Porter J. Goss (R-Fla.) and Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan)."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/08/AR2007120801664.html?hpid=topnews

Jabberwocka

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Registered: 03-18-2000
Mon, 06-15-2009 - 10:37am

"most of us were shocked, then scared, then furious in the wake of the 9/11 attacks."


True but cooler heads should have prevailed. There we had Bush strutting around being Mr Macho-man. People were expected to be fearful it was magnified & played out to a fever pitch. 9/11 was a gift to further their agenda.


 


Photobucket&nbs

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-18-2000
Mon, 06-15-2009 - 11:04am

"he's backing away. Makes me spitting mad."


Me too.

 


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