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Tuesday, August 18, 2009

Foolhardy

Limiting the authoritarian ambitions and imperial pretensions of the Presidency in a time of trumped-up hysteria is "Foolhardy," says John Yoo as he prepares to teach "Civil Law" to an upcoming generation of would-be practitioners of the Law at my University. Lovely.

ABCNews
[A]ctivists protested Monday at the University of California, Berkeley to call for the firing of a law professor…. Campus police arrested at least four people….

The demonstrators said John Yoo should be dismissed, disbarred and prosecuted for war crimes for his work as a Bush administration attorney from 2001 to 2003, when he helped craft legal theories for waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques….

Yoo, 42, has defended the controversial interrogation techniques, saying they were needed to protect the country from terrorists after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

"To limit the president's constitutional power to protect the nation from foreign threats is simply foolhardy," Yoo wrote in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece last month.

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