What do you know about John Yoo?

Evil architect of deconstructionist Constitutional theory?

Bio from AEI: http://www.aei.org/scholars/filter.,scholarID.74/scholar.asp

His book: The Powers of War and Peace: The Constitution and Foreign Affairs after 9/11 (University of Chicago Press, October 2005), reviewed for the American Enterprise Institute, where he is a visiting scholar (I know, I know -- get your barf bags handy). Here's the press release/summary: http://www.aei.org/publications/pubID.23386,filter.all/pub_detail.asp

According to the brief review (http://www.aei.org/books/bookID.832/book_detail.asp), "Yoo roots his controversial analysis in a brilliant reconstruction of the original understanding of the foreign affairs power and supplements it with arguments based on constitutional text, structure, and history."

<snip>

Practically, The Powers of War and Peace argues that:

:graybox: The president can initiate military hostilities without a declaration of war or other authorization by Congress. Congress’s primary method for controlling presidential decisions lies in the power over appropriations. The federal courts have no constitutional role in interfering with the struggle between the president and Congress for control over war making.

:graybox: Presidents can violate international law when they decide whether to use force abroad. Thus, even if critics are correct that the invasion of Iraq was illegal under the United Nations Charter, the president still had the constitutional authority to begin hostilities. Congress’s authorization for the war, while unnecessary, only underscored the President’s constitutional power. Similarly, the war in Kosovo was constitutional, even though it clearly violated international law.

:graybox: The president has the authority to interpret and apply treaties on behalf of the United States. He need not consult with the Senate or the courts before interpreting a treaty. The president also has the discretion under the Constitution to unilaterally terminate or suspend treaties. President George W. Bush was well within his powers to interpret the Geneva Conventions as excluding the war with al Qaeda and to hold that the Taliban was never entitled to the benefits of POW status.

:graybox: In making treaties, the president and the Senate must cooperate with Congress to implement treaties that rest within the enumerated powers of the federal government. Treaties, on their own, cannot directly regulate the rights and duties of private citizens without implementation by Congress. Simple statutes can perform much of the function of treaties, when combined with an international agreement made by the president, by establishing certain standards of conduct on private citizens.

<snip>

John Yoo explains it all!

Here he is defending Clarence Thomas: http://www.aei.org/publications/filter.all,pubID.21776/pub_detail.asp Hey, guess what? He clerked for him!

Currently at UC Berkeley: http://www.law.berkeley.edu/faculty/yooj/ This page includes links to many opinion pieces.

NNDB link: http://www.nndb.com/people/327/000049180/

"Former clerk for Laurence H. Silberman at the Court of Appeals, and later for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas 1994-5. Served as Deputy Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel at the DOJ 2001-3, where wrote substantial parts of the PATRIOT act with Viet Dinh, and he co-authored a report that basically trashed the Geneva Conventions. He is now a law professor at U.C. Berkeley's Boalt Hall Law School.

The forty-two page memo in question, which he authored in January 2002, stipulated that since Afghanistan has no formal government to speak of, neither the Geneva Convention nor any other laws of war apply. This breaks a fifty-year U.S. military tradition of upholding those rules, rules that we adopted because we expect them to be applied to us. When the U.S. state department read Yoo's memo, they were "horrified", their chief legal advisor calling it "seriously flawed." But George W. Bush approved the policies in the memo, ultimately resulting in the Abu Ghraib fiasco and similar atrocities being committed in other Iraqi prisons as well as those in Afghanistan."

He's a busy guy. I'm sure there's more, but I've only spent 15 minutes looking.

at the University of California-

Yoo at Berkeley/Boalt Hall

Bisharat at Hastings/San Francisco.

:shrug: :shrug:

It's the same group of guys all the time. They just trade them in and out of certain departments, and assign them certain useful tasks, and then shuffle them off to do bad somewhere else.

How the hell could Viet Dinh, a Vietnamese, author something so authoritarian as that piece of legislation? His family came to the US to escape authoritarian tyranny after Saigon fell to Hanoi and the Communist Party, so why would he try and adopt the same authoritarian philosophy with respect to state power?

and tyranny, yet they consistently vote Republican. :crazy:

:thumbsup: Always appreciated.

Berkeley?Isn't that the most liberal college in the country?

Infiltrating the enemy? :shrug:

War counsel

Conservative legal scholar John Yoo, whose memos helped shape White House policy, says the framers gave the president all the war powers of a king

By Christopher Shea | October 23, 2005

"The memo got some seriously bad reviews. ''The stench of corruption permeates the page," wrote the Yale law professor Jack Balkin, on his blog. Now, in a new book, ''The Powers of War and Peace: The Constitution and Foreign Affairs after 9/11" (Chicago), Yoo has produced a full blueprint for the kind of potent presidency he thinks is necessary to fight the Global War on Terror. Given his connections to the administration, Yoo's sketch of the presidency will no doubt be interpreted in some quarters as revealing how the Bush White House sees itself in its dreams."

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2005/10/23/war_counsel?mode=PF

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/18431

By David Cole

"Few lawyers have had more influence on President Bush's legal policies in the "war on terror" than John Yoo. This is a remarkable feat, because Yoo was not a cabinet official, not a White House lawyer, and not even a senior officer within the Justice Department. He was merely a mid-level attorney in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel with little supervisory authority and no power to enforce laws. Yet by all accounts, Yoo had a hand in virtually every major legal decision involving the US response to the attacks of September 11, and at every point, so far as we know, his advice was virtually always the same— the president can do whatever the president wants."