Should John Yoo Teach Separation of Powers After Teaching Presidential Right to Separate You from Your Testicles?

Photo by Catherine Hourcade

By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, January 15, 2024

John Yoo was a public disgrace. He used his law degree to gin up justifications for President George W. Bush to do absolutely anything he wanted, including war and torture, warrantless surveillance and lawless imprisonment. Yoo publicly argued that a U.S. president (or at least a Republican one) could crush your testicles if need be.

Now Yoo is a respected “conservative” commentator in U.S. media and teaching UC Berkeley students about the “separation of powers.” (The emperor has the power to separate you from anything he likes?) Apparently Yoo is paid a half a million dollars a year to preach the benefits of dictatorial power at a “liberal” state university.

Cynthia Papermaster (pictured at right above) and CODEPINK in the Bay area have never let up in holding Yoo to account for his outrages, and never adjusted their position to accept corporate media rehabilitations of aging war criminals.

Here’s a report from Papermaster on a recent event:

“We don’t like John Yoo” said the UC Law School student who came over to the Guantanamo Survivors Fund bake sale table to buy a brownie.

“Oh? I thought he was a very popular professor?” I asked.

“No. I would never take a class with him,” she said firmly.

We heard variations of this over and over again on January 10 at our law school action.

This is the 22nd year anniversary of Guantanamo Prison in Cuba. CODEPINK activists Marjorie, Catherine, Adrianne, Peter, Cynthia, Q, and Luck-Key took photos with the Close Guantanamo poster marking the 8036 days the prison has been open. We were at the Berkeley Law School to mark the occasion, sell delicious home-baked items to raise money for the Guantanamo Survivors Fund, and get signatures on a petition to

1) request that John Yoo donate a year’s salary, about $500,000, to the fund and
2) call for Yoo’s prosecution for complicity in torture.

Shouldn’t the author of the legal opinions giving the green light to torture “enemy combatants” feel some responsibilty for the torture of Guantanamo prisoners, most of whom were never charged with crimes and yet have been held many years at Gitmo?

The students were eager to buy the brownies, cookies and cupcakes, and to sign the petition. We raised a little over $100 for the Guantanamo Survivors Fund, and about 20 students signed the petition.

We met a student whose cousin is a former Guantanamo prisoner. We met a student who works for the Center for Human Rights at the Law School who was interested in collaborating on an event on accountability for torture. We met lots of students who objected to Professor Yoo being on the UC Law School faculty.

The rain held off, it was a beautiful day, and at the end of our action we went to Dean Chermerinsky’s office to ask him to get John Yoo’s signature on the check for $500,000. We left the check with Erwin’s assistant and she said she would give it to the Dean with our request. Significantly, in 2014, Dean Chemerinsky said The Nation magazine that Yoo should be criminally prosecuted:

“I think he [John Yoo] should be,” Chemerinsky said. “All who planned, all who implemented, all who carried out the torture should be criminally prosecuted. How else do we as a society express our outrage? How else do we deter it in the future, except by criminal prosecutions?”