Torture Memo Author John Yoo Blames Ruined Reputation on "Hippies, Protesters and Left-wing Activists"

By Jason Leopold, TruthOut.org. Posted March 20, 2009.

The October 23, 2001, "memorandum represents a departure, although perhaps for understandable reasons, from the preferred practice of OLC to render formal opinions only with respect to specific and concrete policy proposals and not to undertake a general survey of a broad area of the law or to address general or amorphous hypothetical scenarios that implicate difficult questions of law," Bradbury wrote.

The Register did not question Yoo about those memos, presumably because the interview took place prior to the DOJ's release of the legal opinions.

Yoo's legal work during Bush's first term in office has been roundly criticized by dozens of the nation's leading legal scholars.

Dawn Johnsen, who has been tapped by President Barack Obama to head the OLC, has publicly criticized the work of Yoo and other OLC officials under Bush. In a 2006 Indiana Law Journal article, she said the function of the OLC should be to "provide an accurate and honest appraisal of applicable law, even if that advice will constrain the administration's pursuit of desired policies."

Johnsen, who is a staunch supporter of releasing OLC memos publicly, said Yoo conducted his work as an advocate of Bush administration policy.

"The advocacy model of lawyering, in which lawyers craft merely plausible legal arguments to support their clients' desired actions, inadequately promotes the president's constitutional obligation to ensure the legality of executive action," said Johnsen, who served in the OLC under President Bill Clinton.

In fact, a DOJ watchdog appears to share that view.

An investigation by H. Marshall Jarrett, head of the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR), reached "damning" conclusions about numerous cases of "misconduct" in the advice from John Yoo and other lawyers in the OLC during the Bush administration, according to legal sources familiar with the report's contents.

"I wish they weren't doing it, but I understand why they are," Yoo told the OC Register in response to a question about Jarrett's probe. "It is something one would expect. You have to make these kinds of decisions in an unprecedented kind of war with legal questions we've never had to think about before. We didn't seek out those questions. 9/11 kind of thrust them on us. No matter what you do, there's going to be a lot of people who are upset with your decision. If Bush had done nothing, there would be a lot of people upset with his decision, too. I understood that while we were doing it, there were going to be people who were critical. I can't go farther into it, because it's still going on right now. I'm not trying to escape responsibility for my decisions. I have to wait and see what they say."

The OPR report was completed late last year, but was kept under wraps by Attorney General Michael Mukasey while Bush finished out his days in office, the sources said.

According to people familiar with the OPR report, Yoo was briefed on the report in January. Yoo is said to have informed officials at the University of California at Berkeley, where he is a tenured law professor, according to two senior law school officials. He took a leave of absence in January to teach foreign relations law at Chapman.

While teaching at Berkeley, he was routinely the subject of protests by students and faculty.

Last month, Brad DeLong, a UC Berkeley economics professor, wrote a letter to Robert Birgenau, Berkeley's Chancellor, calling for Yoo to be fired.

"Out of a concern for justice, a concern for humanity, and a concern for our reputation as a university, to dismiss Professor John Yoo from membership in our university," says DeLong's February 16 letter.

Yoo said he's not surprised at the reception he received at Berkeley.

"Berkeley is sort of a magnet for hippies, protesters and left-wing activists," Yoo said. "So I'm not surprised that being one of the few recognizable conservatives on campus that I would generate a lot of heat and friction. It happened well before working in the Bush administration."

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Jason Leopold is the former Los Angeles bureau chief of Dow Jones Newswires where he spent two years covering the energy crisis and the Enron bankruptcy. He just finished writing a book about the crisis, due out in December through Rowman & Littlefield.

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