Friday is the 2012 Commencement ceremony at UC Berkeley Law (Boalt Hall).
How time flies! Yet another class of successful, proud graduates will celebrate Commencement having spent their entire law school career with a war criminal, as defined under international law and legal precedent, on the faculty.
Torture Lawyer John Yoo is still at Boalt, teaching constitutional law, and ethics. He is still being protected from criticism, protest, and university investigation by the leadership of Boalt and of UC itself. In fact, increasingly Yoo is praised and promoted. How many more law students will learn constitutional law from John Yoo? How many more future lawyers and judges will UC train to take war criminals as their role models?
What is it about TORTURE – an absolutely illegal, immoral practice, a crime against humanity -- that the University of California doesn't understand?
Perhaps those responsible for UC's quality of education, from the Chancellor and the Board of Regents on down to Boalt's Dean Edley, have decided they must follow the lead from Obama and the Democrats – who are protecting from prosecution and accountability every member of the Bush-Cheney Torture Team, as these criminals return to academia and/or the corporate world.
The lawyer whose unethical, crackpot re-writing of the law gave the Bush Regime the legal green light for torture, John Yoo, should long ago have been fired, disbarred and prosecuted. His criminal actions as a hired gun for a lawless White House are no more acceptable than they were ten years ago. To people of conscience, or in societies where the rule of law has any meaning, that is.
And torture, and demands for accountability from government officials and ex-officials who set the U.S. government on its lawless course, is not "old news." Brutal, criminal harm continues to unfold and even expand, as the Torture State and the Imperial Presidency of the Bush era turn into the "new normal" under Obama.
The "cover your ass" legal reasoning employed by the University of California to protect Berkeley Law professor John Yoo from accountability for his criminal activity at the Department of Justice during the Bush regime fails to silence repudiation of the "enhanced interrogation" policies Yoo's work product facilitated. And it discredits the process for application of the law school's own ethical standards for teaching.
Since protesting Yoo's "Torture Memos" at the 2004 Boalt Hall graduation, students have challenged the presence of a war criminal on their faculty. Yet despite numerous letter and petition campaigns to investigate professional misconduct, community vigils in support of torture victims, even a City Council resolution to prosecute the professor for war crimes, school administrators have not only refused to investigate Yoo's performance but have actually promoted his discredited work.
World Can't Wait stands with Boalt Hall grads and all people of conscience who say NO! to torture in their names.
Speak out. Bring signs. Distribute orange ribbons to represent the prisoners languishing at Guantanamo, Bagram, and "black sites" around the globe.
We refuse to live in a torture state!
War Criminals Watch Events 
