The American Political Science Association, which will be meeting next week in San Francisco, will be featuring John Yoo on two panels. Many political scientists are protesting this decision, and will be protesting Yoo at his panels. I am not attending the conference this year, but I wrote the following letter to the two program chairs of the conference.
Dear Professors Jamal and Hyde:
In his celebrated diary of daily life in the Third Reich, Victor Klemperer writes:
If one day the situation were reversed and the fate of the vanquished lay in my hands, then I would let all the ordinary folk go and even some of the leaders, who might perhaps after all have had honourable intentions and not known what they were doing. But I would have all the intellectuals strung up, and the professors three feet higher than the rest; they would be left hanging from the lamp posts for as long as was compatible with hygiene.
The reason Klemperer reserved such special contempt for the professors and intellectuals of the 1920s and 1930s was that professors and intellectuals played a special role in bringing on the horrors of the Nazi regime, as Claudia Koonz and other historians have documented. Not only did those professors and intellectuals provide some of the leading arguments for the rise of that regime, but they also served in that regime: as doctors, population experts, engineers, propagandists. And lawyers.
We now come to the matter of John Yoo, Emmanuel S. Heller Professor of Law at UC Berkeley, who has been invited to address the annual conference of the American Political Science Association, which will be meeting in San Francisco next week, and whose speech acts while serving as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Bush administration did so much to bring about the torture regime of that era. While there is no need to rehearse all of those speech acts, we might recall that in his lengthy memo of 2003, Yoo claimed that detainees of the US military could be legally stripped of their clothing “for a period of time” and interrogated naked. If you have trouble visualizing what that might mean, have a look at these photographs from Abu Ghraib. In that same memo, Yoo mooted the possibility that actions ordinarily considered illegal—including gouging an eye, dousing a prisoner with “scalding water, corrosive acid, or caustic substance,” or biting—might well be legal in time of war: the president’s powers as commander in chief were that broad.
When it comes to torture, our minds often drift to the torturer or his higher-ups in the Pentagon and the CIA. But as Jane Mayer documented in The Dark Side, the torture regime of George W. Bush was very much a lawyers’ regime. As one of Yoo’s colleagues told Mayer, “It’s incredible, but John Yoo and David Addington were running the war on terror almost on their own.” Yoo’s memos were not the idle speculations of a cloistered academic; stamped with the seal of the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) at the Justice Department, they had the force of law, issuing binding interpretations of existing statutes that could only be overturned by the Attorney General. As Mayer explains, “For Yoo’s allies in the White House, his position at OLC was a political bonanza. It was like having a personal friend who could write medical prescriptions.” Harvard Law Professor Jack Goldsmith, who headed the OLC in 2003, adds that Yoo-type memos were essentially “get-out-of-jail-free cards.” That is why former CIA head George Tenet has written:
Despite what Hollywood might have you believe, in situations like these [the capture, interrogation, and torture of Al Qaeda logistics chief Abu Zubayda] you don’t call in the tough guys; you call in the lawyers.
That’s how powerful John Yoo was.
Since the election of Donald Trump, we have heard much from our profession about “norm erosion” and the ways in which an ostensibly democratic society like our own can devolve into an authoritarian or even fascist society. While the history of the Trump ascendancy has yet to be written, it will be difficult, when the time comes, for future historians to neglect the role of John Yoo in preparing the way for that devolution. As Duke Law Professor Walter Dellinger, who headed the OLC under Bill Clinton, said of the vision of “the embodiment of power for the executive” that lay at the heart of Yoo’s memos: “it’s like Mussolini in 1930.”
I fear that with this invitation to Yoo to address our profession, as if he were simply the author of controversial and heterodox opinions rather than the architect of a regime of torture and barbarity, the American Political Science Association has written itself a chapter in those future histories.
Sincerely,
Corey Robin
Professor of Political Science
Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center
{ 51 comments }
MPAVictoria 08.25.17 at 5:38 pm
Disgusting. Simply disgusting. Obama had a chance to arrest and prosecute these people. History will remember his failure.
Waiting for Godot 08.25.17 at 5:46 pm
What form are and will the protests take, will there be any collective action besides letters? It seems to me that one of the lasting problems of the Trump experience has been to distract from the lasting horrors of the Bush II regime and the continuity of policy between the two especially as it relates to Russia.
kidneystones 08.25.17 at 7:13 pm
Criticizing any academic is fine.
Yo0’s original study of the historical limits of presidential authority, however, passed peer review long before Bush planned and executed the policies detailed in the OP. Yoo’s argument is one many here are familiar with and embrace. Defeating enemies in time of war (civil and otherwise) justifies uses of presidential authority not otherwise acceptable, at least according to historical legal precedent. Much of which evolved from Lincoln’s efforts to defeat politically and militarily powerful state sanctioned slavery, torture, and racism in Those who question the quality and accuracy of Yoo’s interpretations of the legal constraints of presidential authority should do so. But that doesn’t appear to be the case in the OP. Google John Stewart-John Yoo and we get a good selection of articles discussing the problems of trying to pin the actions of US presidents on a single academic.
If nothing else, Yoo’s legal arguments merit hearing, not least because of their historical significance. We may abhor violence of all kinds, but the US at least attempts to ground the implementation and limits of state-sanctioned violence within the law. Turning all those Japanese civilians into little matchsticks might have been legal, but that doesn’t make it right. We need to be able to recognize and discuss the distinctions.
kidneystones 08.25.17 at 7:27 pm
‘…torture, and racism in the civil war.’ Apologies.
bruce wilder 08.25.17 at 8:40 pm
Thank you for your clarity.
Karl Kolchak 08.25.17 at 9:17 pm
Good for you, Corey. The political rehabilitation of Bush and his cronies in recent years has been sickening. They should all be tried for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
engels 08.25.17 at 10:13 pm
Well said. The only place John Yoo should be addressing learned men and women from is the dock in the Hague.
Collin Street 08.25.17 at 10:47 pm
The United States of America has the legal system of a repressive apartheid state. I mean, seriously, a lawyer in Alabama under Jim Crow, he’s an agent of oppression.
And nothing’s changed since then. The constitution hasn’t changed, the jurisprudential framework hasn’t changed, the training for lawyers hasn’t changed. The systemic racism hasn’t changed either. The US legal system is fatally compromised, and people who are working within that system without calling for radical change are compromised as well.
[I mean… this is what gets me about the whole bill-of-rights fetishism thing: it didn’t work. All those lovely constitutional guarantees didn’t stop all the white southerners running their herrenvolk state for two hundred years; why should we hold them as useful today?]
Ben Alpers 08.26.17 at 12:30 am
Powerfully and effectively said. This is a very important issue. Thanks for stating the case against Yoo so succinctly and forcefully.
Peter T 08.26.17 at 1:53 am
Well said
kidneystones – way to miss the point. When Yoo issued these advices, he was the second most senior law officer of the US. Unless and until his advice was over-ruled in court, his advice stood as guidance on the law to US officials. And just maybe there had been some changes in law between the Civil War and the year 2000? Hague treaties perhaps? Civil Rights acts? I’m sure you could find some with little effort.
kidneystones 08.26.17 at 4:41 am
@10 Actually, what I did find with fairly little effort was Yoo’s publication history via his page https://www.law.berkeley.edu/our-faculty/faculty-profiles/john-yoo/
I also watched the Yoo interview with Stewart and re-read a number of the articles on Yoo. Critiques of Yoo’s legal arguments can and should be made. Certainly his views should be heard and debated. That’s what university forums are for, or once were. Berkeley has come out strongly recently in defense of freedom of speech. Given that Yoo’s arguments underpinned policies many reject, it seems mighty odd to deny university students and his peers the opportunity to hear and critique these positions from Yoo in a university setting. That to me is the point. Not least because Obama, whilst publicly denouncing torture, cemented and expanded the powers of the presidency claimed by Cheney-Bush. http://fortune.com/2017/01/18/obama-trump-abuse-executive-powers-presidency/
Peter T 08.26.17 at 5:34 am
“Certainly his views should be heard and debated.”. While we are at it, let’s have an open, civilised debate on how to cook the children of the poor, and whether blacks are human, and which is the best way to stake kidneystones down on a fire-ant nest. All in the spirit of free speech and open inquiry.
We can have these edifying and intellectually engaging disputes right after we have carefully considered Yoo’s position that eye-gouging and burning are not actually torture.
Collin Street 08.26.17 at 5:55 am
Fuck off, kidneystones, you’re a narcissistic moron.
Collin Street 08.26.17 at 6:06 am
Nobody cares what you think, kidneystones, because we’ve observed repeatedly that it doesn’t vary in light of new information.
J-D 08.26.17 at 8:04 am
kidneystones, given the historical influence of John Yoo’s arguments, there’s a case for discussion of what’s wrong with them; but that discussion does not require his presence, and even if (hypothetically) his presence might contribute something of value to that discussion, the price is too high.
kidneystones 08.26.17 at 8:20 am
@12 Given that there’s a great deal of violence and injustice in modern western societies, often state-sanctioned and legal, I’d say understanding the legal underpinnings of how we got here is essential, especially when significant subsets of the population supports the use of violence in times of war and against certain undesirables. As you note, these events occur and will occur in the real world, not just in the abstract. The mechanisms for rolling back the expanded versions (instituted by Obama and detailed in the second link) will require some clear thinking, dispassionate argument, and legally-binding solutions.
Not understanding how and why we have arrived at this particular juncture might make formulating solutions easier, but I don’t see how. We do need to understand institutional violence in all its forms, not just in the abstract. 3 out of 4 African-American males of high school age failed the literacy test in California in 2016. Yet, symbols of the past capture the attention of the press and many ‘progressives’.
Reading about ‘gouging an eye’ may give you fits, but for me the continued indifference to the plight of African-Americans in the education system and the social costs of this phenomena, not to mention the shrugs, is more obscene. Low turnout among African-Americans in the last election was predicted repeatedly and ignored. Facing facts and understanding the arguments seems the wiser course.
@13 and 14 Nice to see you’ve retained your optimism, wit, good humor, and commitment to reasoned debate.
kidneystones 08.26.17 at 8:31 am
J-D. I’ll reply and then retire. Your opinion on the utility of having Yoo present appears to rest entirely on the notion that Yoo’s arguments come from him, rather than from a particular reading of the law. Given his role in the crafting of justifying the limits of presidential power, his presence seems to me essential if one is genuinely concerned about the perils of a Trump presidency. Surely, the ongoing risks of an unhinged president possessing greatly expanded powers add urgency to finding ways to roll-back the presidential powers gifted Trump by Obama. Democrats, btw, had the chance to take a moral and legal position contra Bush/You in 2006 when they could have impeached Bush.
But no, wrecking the economy, invading Iraq, and laying waste to the middle-class was pretty much ok with Pelosi and company. The real risk is from a rodeo clown who’s yet to start any new wars with anyone, but who says bad things.
Happy to see you back, Corey. Good luck with the new edition!
Fake Dave 08.26.17 at 11:53 am
@ Kidneystones 16
What does a low literacy rate for African Americans have to do with, well, anything? Isn’t that just whataboutism? I think people are perfectly capable of caring about two things at once.
As for the argument that it’s all systemic, I say bunk. Laws are passed, enforced, and interpreted by human beings and sometimes those human beings are complete scumbags. Yoo’s broad interpretation of presidential power was not just a matter of reading a law in a specific way, it was a political act that was carried out behind closed doors. It’s great that we’re having a conversation about it now, but fourteen years ago those memos were doing incredible damage and the press and public was in the dark.
Many aspects of the torture and detention regime have since been declared illegal, but that was too little too late for the people who suffered in the black sites, Abu Ghraib, Bagram, and Guantanamo. Yoo’s greatest crime wasn’t saying “this is legal.” It was saying it behind closed doors so that no one else could say “no it isn’t.”
The Lincoln comparisons don’t really make sense. Yes, he suspended habeas corpus, but the whole country knew he did it and why. I don’t know that he ever did anything as shady as running secret torture camps, but I could just be ignorant I suppose.
I say people like John Yoo, Henry Kissinger, and Ollie North deserve to be excluded from civil society for what they did behind closed doors and I am perpetually gobsmacked by how many otherwise reasonable commentators are willing to accept their rehabilitation.
J-D 08.26.17 at 12:49 pm
kidneystones
If non sequitur ever becomes an Olympic event, you should try out for the team.
Presumably you have access to a dictionary in which one of the definitions of ‘reply’ is ‘ignore you and ride my hobbyhorses’, but I do not.
Layman 08.26.17 at 1:01 pm
kidneystones: “Democrats, btw, had the chance to take a moral and legal position contra Bush/You in 2006 when they could have impeached Bush.”
I could have impeached Bush!? Why the fuck didn’t someone tell me I could?
Fake Dave: “I say people like John Yoo, Henry Kissinger, and Ollie North deserve to be excluded from civil society for what they did behind closed doors and I am perpetually gobsmacked by how many otherwise reasonable commentators are willing to accept their rehabilitation.”
Hear, hear!
@ Corey Robin
Great letter. Keep up the good fight!
Renee Heberle 08.26.17 at 4:37 pm
Good letter and I basically agree that Yoo should not have a platform as a legitimate scholar of anything anywhere. However, I am not sure what would have happened had APSA refused the roundtable submissions on the grounds that Yoo was included. I suppose they could have simply rejected the roundtables (it is a selective process and lots of people do not get accepted to present). If APSA did not invite him in particular, we should be asking questions of those who did submit the roundtables, why they think it is necessary to have him as part of those roundtables, and putting them on the hotseat to explain their rationale and purpose (get more attention to an otherwise regular old APSA discussion? The idea that he contributes anything unique or original is hardly the case–there are plenty of judicial and presidential scholars I’d rather listen to.) In any event, I want to protest his presence at APSA and in my discipline, but I’m not sure condemning APSA as such is the path. This is actually an opportunity to relight fires of accountability at his school and elsewhere for keeping him on board. I hope many protest and speak from the floor about his past and against those who support his having a platform to speak.
Bob 08.26.17 at 7:28 pm
This OP reminded me of the article at the link below on the Yoo case by Brian Leiter.
Leiter addresses, in a convincing way to me, why Yoo’s employment with Berkeley should not be terminated. Of course, that is not what Corey is calling for in the OP. Corey just doesn’t want Yoo to be invited to speak at the American Political Science Association meeting. But if Yoo should not be fired, does it not then follow that he should also be allowed to carry out other normal functions of an academic, like participating in conferences? I am not actually arguing the latter point in the guise of a question. I am genuinely uncertain. I am not sure what Leiter would say about Corey’s position, or what Corey would say about Leiter’s. But Leiter’s piece leads me to have doubts about Corey’s position that I would not otherwise have.
http://leiterlawschool.typepad.com/leiter/2008/04/once-more-int-1.html
Curt Wechsler 08.26.17 at 9:03 pm
Great letter Corey,
May I excerpt your second-to-last paragraph for use in a flier to be distributed outside the event? World Can’t Wait and others will “tableau” in orange jumpsuits to represent Guantanamo prisoners and hand out orange ribbons for attendees to wear inside.
rea 08.26.17 at 9:45 pm
MPAVictoria, the point of what Yoo did was to provide Bush Administration officials with a legal defense to any charges for the torture regime–“Oh, we acted on advice from counsel–we did not violate any rights which we were bound to know.” Obama very properly declined to prosecute them, because the worse possible result was also the most likely result–they would have been acquitted.
Dr. Hilarius 08.26.17 at 11:03 pm
I’m sure that Yoo is a bright man; Harvard, Yale Law and all. But he is still a legal hack who churned out legal memos on demand to provide legal cover and justification for torture.
His torture memos are very similar to the opinion letters written by tax attorneys attesting to the legitimacy of abusive tax shelters. These tax lawyers don’t do objective legal analysis, they craft a product designed to ward off criminal prosecution (“We acted on advice of expert counsel who said it was lawful.”).
Even within DOJ at the time, Yoo’s memos were criticized for poor legal reasoning and selective use of existing precedent. His hiring at Berkeley was based on his celebrity status and political connections rather than any demonstrable legal brilliance. Shame, shame on the school for that. His hiring at Berkeley gave him status outside the orbit of right-wing think tanks. Good on Corey for this post.
Ebenezer Scrooge 08.26.17 at 11:54 pm
I’ll accept Kidneystones’ premise for the sake of argument: that Yoo’s Constitutional views should be taken seriously. I still can’t accept his conclusion: that Yoo should be invited to any place but The Hague.
Academics are relatively free of responsibility. They craft arguments; they don’t wield real power. Consider Professor Posner, who speculated about baby-selling, to little practical effect. Judge Posner would never think of it. Power demands responsibility, but professors don’t have much power. Professor Yoo can play with the limits of the Presidential war power. Law review articles hurt nothing but trees. Deputy Assistant Attorney General Yoo cannot, because nobody has a right to cause the torture of others.
So by all means, have a symposium on the deep Constitutional thought of John Yoo, such as it may be. But please don’t invite any unrepentant criminal torturers to the party.
J-D 08.27.17 at 12:05 am
Bob
Terminating somebody’s employment is a severe penalty; not inviting somebody to speak at the APSA meeting is not such a severe penalty. Conduct which does not constitute sufficient grounds to terminate somebody’s employment can still constitute sufficient grounds not to extend an invitation to speak at an APSA meeting.
orangeman 08.27.17 at 12:39 am
Nero Wolfe gold bookmark (and what MAPvictoria @1 said)
Let us not forget, that dehumanization of our enemy is part of the GWOT, where Bush, and Obama, and Trump continue to kill others for no good cause.
Collin Street 08.27.17 at 12:43 am
Yoo’s Constitutional views should be taken seriously.
Nobody’s views on the US constitution should be taken seriously. Fitting the US constitution into a Jim Crow society required removing most of the bones bones and organs so that it’d fit, and what remains isn’t a fit subject of enquiry for serious scholars.
I’d call it a joke, but jokes don’t kill people. Honestly, planning out magic-the-gathering decks is a more-credible intellectual exercise, because MtG at least has rules.
Collin Street 08.27.17 at 1:39 am
“Oh, we acted on advice from counsel–we did not violate any rights which we were bound to know.â€
I really don’t see how that’s supposed to work, btw: very, very few laws are framed such that mens-rea requires knowing/believing that your acts are illegal. A good-faith belief that your acts are legal is no defence to anything even if you can prove it, and “I was so confident of my legal rightness I specifically asked my lawyers to hunt through every case and statute they could find” is if anything more proof of doubt on your part than confidence.
[how does it even get presented as evidence? Documents are worthless if they can’t be validated — say for “these were prepared in good faith” — and the validation process includes calling and cross-examining the people who prepared them. Who in this case are your lawyers.]
LFC 08.27.17 at 1:43 am
@Collin Street
Your views on the U.S. Constitution are, at a minimum, very overstated. It’s certainly far from a perfect document in many respects. But the Reconstruction amendments, and particularly the 14th amendment once the courts began applying it vigorously, did lay the groundwork for the eventual legislative and judicial dismantlement of Jim Crow. The issues of structural racism and inequality and mass incarceration remain of course, but it’s not accurate to blame them primarily on the U.S. Const.
And your implication that a lawyer in 1950s Alabama was trained the same way lawyers are today is absurd. Assuming the Alabama lawyer went to a law school (which by the ’50s he prob did) rather than reading law in an office, they both prob were required to read cases as arranged in a casebook, and that’s where the similarity ends. Law schools today encompass more than the case method (e.g., some clinical/practical training is usu. offered) and the content of what’s taught (beyond the basic courses like contracts) is quite different. For ex., an Alabama lawyer in the ’50s was v. unlikely to have taken a course in civil rights, which, though it may be an elective rather than required, is a standard part of law school curricula today.
Collin Street 08.27.17 at 1:49 am
Conduct which does not constitute sufficient grounds to terminate somebody’s employment can still constitute sufficient grounds not to extend an invitation to speak at an APSA meeting.
Relevantly: conduct which does not constitute sufficient grounds to terminate somebody’s employment can still constitute sufficient grounds to limit the scope of that person’s normal employment. A person accused on reasonable grounds of financial carelessness might reasonably be denied normal access to petty cash, for example, even if the
[but, again: conservatives are all all-or-nothing people. If Yoo is an academic, then he has to be able to do everything that a normal academic can do, regardless of specific unusual circumstances that might make it more sensible to create some sort of special accommodation.
Which, yeah, stereotype thinking, which, yeah, that thing it always comes back to. Reducing the cognitive load of having to treat different people differently is more important than getting objectively-good outcomes, and all that.]
Layman 08.27.17 at 2:32 am
Collin Street: “I really don’t see how that’s supposed to work, btw…”
Yes, but that’s a statement about _you_.
Collin Street 08.27.17 at 2:44 am
But the Reconstruction amendments, and particularly the 14th amendment once the courts began applying it vigorously, did lay the groundwork for the eventual legislative and judicial dismantlement of Jim Crow.
If you chose to distinguish “did not function until a hundred years had passed and until the state was under severe internal and external social pressure” from “completely fucking useless” you are of course free to.
I can expound further, but basically the civil rights movement succeeded as a result of social pressure. Extra-legal: not illegal, but expressed and manifest in non-judicial channels; the courts and legal system merely acquiesced to forces they could not stop, rejecting well-established legal principles for the sake of claiming they were right all along.
Saying that the US constitution “caused” the end of jim crow is like saying the wehrmacht caused the end of wwii in europe by surrendering.
Pavel A 08.27.17 at 3:31 am
Yoo belongs in the same docket as Slobodan Milosevic. But here to tell us more us is
A Nazi sympathizerKidnestones!Mike Schilling 08.27.17 at 4:14 am
# 13 is an example of the moderated commenting system? Well done, all.
Conor O'Brien 08.27.17 at 9:05 am
Mike Schilling @ 36 “# 13 is an example of the moderated commenting system? Well done, all.”
I found comment #13 useful (Fuck off, kidneystones, you’re a narcissistic moron.) because it’s brevity signaled the usefulness of the contributions that followed from that source. It saved me from having to consider them too seriously.
That can be a good approach to moderating.
It might even be argued that allowing a repeat performance could be occasionally useful as a form of vaccination by reminder.
Just not too often please. As a farmer, I have developed a tolerance for occasional abuse, but the quality of Colin Street’s comments is rather low.
kidneystones 08.27.17 at 10:07 am
18 Thanks for this. Agreed, but I’d say it’s far easier not to care about two things, or more at the same time. Why care about African-Americans in this specific context? Because African-Americans stayed home rather than turn out for a white geriatric millionaire neo-con in a pantsuit in key states.
To spell it more clearly most people don’t care that much about the plight of those worse off and tearing down statues of Confederate heroes whilst 3/4 African-American populace remain illiterate doesn’t exactly scream – here come improved circumstances, anymore than electing an African-American president did.
Re: Yoo and providing him with legitimacy. Berkeley Law school has already done that.
rea is precisely right – they would have been let-off and who better to explain how we might legally rollback the excesses of the Obama administration (which don’t seem to bother anyone here very much) than the leading national expert (or one of them) on the limitations of presidential power?
kidneystones 08.27.17 at 10:36 am
@22 Thanks for the link, Bob. Agreed, Corey really should try to address the points raised in this letter.
Railing about the past seems all the rage these days, rather than focusing on current and future risks outlined here: http://fortune.com/2017/01/18/obama-trump-abuse-executive-powers-presidency/ by Elizabeth Goitein, the co-director of the Liberty and National Security program at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law.
We have Obama and his liberty-loving supporters to thank for kill-lists, Libya, and so much more. For what its worth, many of my own American left-leaning acquaintances (who loath Trump) wanted so see Obama impeached for legitimizing the assassination of American citizens. Crickets, right?
RD 08.27.17 at 2:19 pm
KS@38
Confederate heroes:
A Hero is someone who accomplished great deeds against great odds.
A Tragic figure is someone who might have been a Hero, if …
Lee refused the command of the Union Army.
One could argue that had he accepted, the Civil War might have been over in months,
The South would have averted destruction, slavery would have died a natural death,and Lee would have succeeded Lincoln as a 2 term POTUS.
Faustusnotes 08.27.17 at 2:43 pm
This is a classic example of why kidneystones needs to be permanently booted from this site.
LFC 08.27.17 at 8:44 pm
Collin Street @34
Yes, the social, ‘extra-legal’ force of the civil rights movement was indeed crucial. But one shouldn’t forget, for instance, the lawyers w the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Thurgood Marshall and his colleagues, who brought pathbreaking litigation. They contributed too, though in the nature of things that contribution played out over a longer period of time (and was a mixture of victories and defeats).
Saying that the US constitution “caused†the end of jim crow
I said those amendments “laid the groundwork” (helped lay it, at any rate), which is definitely not the same as “caused”. I agree that “cause” is not the right word.
Collin Street 08.28.17 at 8:56 am
I said those amendments “laid the groundwork†(helped lay it, at any rate), which is definitely not the same as “causedâ€.
See, I don’t think it did shit; I think any other constitution would have got you basically the same result.
In more detail: the US constitution had [largely dead-letter] rights provisions, yes. These were revivified under social pressure, yes. On this we are in agreement. But if the dead-letter provisions had instead been non-existent… then I think we would have got broadly the same result in broadly the same timeframe. Compare-and-contrast catholic emancipation in the UK, for example: about the same fifty-year frame. Instead of dead-letter provisions being revivified, it would have been provisions being crafted ab-initio, but outside this [fairly narrow technical] legal avenue things would have progressed broadly the same.
Chris Grant 08.28.17 at 2:38 pm
Once you condone hanging, as Klemperer apparently did, might the slope towards condoning torture be somewhat slippery?
Orange Watch 08.28.17 at 5:08 pm
CS@30:
You fundamentally misunderstand why Yoo is difficult if not impossible to prosecute, or even hold accountable. It’s not a legal problem; it’s a political one both in terms of choosing to prosecute and in securing a conviction. The matter of whether or not good faith belief that your actions are legal is a sound defense is far less important than the possibility of a chilling effect arising from holding an executive advisor responsible for the content and consequences of their putatively expert advice. Unitary executive theory casts a long, dark shadow across the modern American political landscape, and there simply is not a willingness to challenge it in mainstream politicians or bureaucrats… or all too frequently, in members of the judiciary, sometimes even when failing to do so means de facto ceding judicial functions to the executive.
pseudo-gorgias 08.29.17 at 12:23 am
Being totally removed from power via popular mandate, the only tool the left has at its disposal is ostracism and shame. But the institutions where the left has the most power (the academy chiefly, but also the media) are quickly losing legitimacy among the public. Indeed, recent polls indicate that the public has more trust in the presidency and congress than in those institutions–and that’s certainly not saying much for congress and the presidency.
A change of tactics for the left might be indicated at this juncture. Just sayin’.
RD 08.29.17 at 12:45 am
…the law is a idiot. Dickens
…Let’s kill all the lawyers. Shakespeare
Lyle 08.29.17 at 2:57 am
p-g:
>A change of tactics for the left might be indicated at this juncture. Just sayin’.
Suggestions are welcome.
MFB 08.30.17 at 8:42 am
What the Bush II administration appears to have done was to codify and legitimate practices such as torture and murder which had existed for a long time in secret — the KUBARK programme, for instance, had been going on since the 1950s, and political murders had gone on for some time, but these were done by the secret police or the secret service and were nodded and winked at. Yoo provided a legal justification for bringing these things out into the open, which would have gone on anyway.
I’m not sure that there’s any point in attacking Yoo unless you are absolutely certain that all those practices have been done away with, that the U.S. government has utterly renounced political murder and torture. After all, he is not now in any kind of position of power. And there have been several Presidential terms since he provided his justifications. Has anything been done to change the situation? As far as I can tell President Obama embraced murder almost as enthusiastically as President Trump has embraced torture.
It all seems a little like locking up Colonel Eugene de Kock for running the apartheid death squad set up by police and army generals and politicians who got off scot-free — except that De Kock actually murdered people.
J-D 08.31.17 at 2:31 am
MFB
To the contrary, if similar practices continue it only strengthens the case for not inviting Yoo to speak to APSA; it could help to set a precedent that APSA will not invite anybody to speak who is similarly complicit in similar practices, which is even more important in relation to practices that continue than it is in relation to practices which have ceased.
kidneystones 08.31.17 at 4:19 am
The level of ignorance on this thread is surprising even by CT standards. Corey’s post is fine as are a few of the comments. Needless to say the topic invites posturing and virtue-signalling and dissent is met with profanity, insult, and the ever predictable demand that dissenting from the OP merits banning.
Yoo is not speaking at the APSA for the first time. Nor, it seems, is he appearing as an invited guest of the ASPA. Conference organizers typically do invite a plenary or key speaker. Yoo ain’t that. Yoo is one of four presenters on two different panels and not even a chair.
For the very few unfamiliar with the process, it’s actually very simple. Conferences are planned in advance by association members/leaders, a theme is agreed-upon, and members are invited to submit proposals for panel discussions and confirm a willingness to chair.
A call for papers is issued to all members. Submissions go conference organizers, or directly to chairs, who then review the abstract-publication history etc.
As Corey well knows, it would be extremely difficult for the conference organizers to overturn an invitation/acceptance offer made by any chair to a panel member on any grounds, and doubly so with an academic of Yoo’s stature – tenured at one of the finest universities in the world, with an excellent publication record, immense understanding of the topics under discussion, and who appeared at the APSA conference in 2011.
There’s a case to be made for prosecuting Yoo, expelling him from academia, and any number of possible actions. It’s not a case I support, but I don’t dismiss the underpinnings for such arguments.
I stand by the argument that the best defense against truly dangerous ideas is to give them a thorough airing in a public forum. Allow the nazis to make their best argument. Do we actually fear defeat from clowns propagating nonsensical claims about ‘racial purity’ of the like propagated by Rushton et al?
We might as well surrender now.
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