For writing one of the most convoluted, illegal, irresponsible legal briefs in our history to justify White House/CIA/Pentagon/Blackwater use of torture. In justifying treatment of prisoners that constitutes 'near organ failure or even death,' you have made all Americans less safe when we are abroad.
WTF Boalt Hall?!!!! Fuck you John Yoo.
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Let me preface this by saying that I do not agree with torture as a legitimate means of gaining intelligence or as a permissible act in general.
To clarify however, it is not illegal to write a legal brief which questions the legality of an act (even torture) or which seeks to more precisely define what constitutes an act (even torture). The contents of the brief (and the leaking of the brief to the public) was irresponsible. However to denote John Yoo's action--writing a non-binding legal opinion brief--as illegal, is itself a convoluted and dangerous accusation.
Wall Street Journal followup
http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/bstephens/?id=110010709
It might not have been illegal, but it was taken as a legal justification for an blatant disregard for the Geneva Convention. Bush operates outside the law, which is my point.
I'm sorry to keep responding to a post so far back in history. Nowhere in your post did you mention Bush. If your point was, "Bush operates outside the law," why not start with that and segway into, "Fuck you John Yoo?"
Also, the Geneva convention covers state actors (official armed forces and other actors for an internationally recognized state) and civilian actors in a time of (declared) war and assumes that state actors remain state actors, and civilian actors remain civilian actors, throughout the length of the conflict. Armed, actively operating non-state actors who conduct activity outside the context of a declared war (a war declared by an internationally recognized state upon another state, not one declared by a subset of a population within a state or exiled from a state) are, strictly speaking, in a legal no-man's-land under the Conventions as they currently exist...which is why there is and has been debate on the conventions and interpretation of the conventions regarding how handle non-state actors who conduct regular and irregular military exercises should be handled.
When the words legal and illegal are used, I assume that a legal document or principle is being invoked along with its stipulations, exceptions, agreements, etc, which ultimately brings me back to my first response where I said that in order for an activity to be illegal, a law (a legal document or principle and its stipulations, exceptions, agreements, etc.) must be broken. To date, non-binding opinion briefs, no matter how outrageous, are completely legal.
And again, my apologies for responding to something so far back in the postings.
*Geneva Conventions
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