Boalt Graduate Defends Demand for Professor's Resignation

On May 22, more than a quarter of the graduating class of Boalt Hall law students protested actions taken by Boalt law professor John Yoo during his tenure as Deputy Assistant Attorney General for the Bush Administration. In January, 2002, Yoo authored a 42-page memo for the Department of Justice advising that the U.S. is not constrained by the Geneva Conventions in its treatment of Taliban and al Qaeda prisoners captured in Afghanistan.

The State Department vigorously opposed this position on several grounds, arguing that it could do great damage to our international standing and the legitimacy of our foreign policy. Subsequent events in both Iraq and Afghanistan have borne out these concerns.

The day before graduation, we authored a petition asking. Yoo to repudiate his official position, or else to resign from the Boalt faculty. (The petition is online at http://www.PetitionOnline.com/

bh2004/petition.html; as of now, more than 250 students and alumni have signed on.) In subsequent media articles on the petition, Prof. Yoo and others opposed our efforts on several grounds.

While he refused to comment on the memo, Yoo characterized the petition as an attack on academic freedom, and asserted that the link between his memo and prisoner abuses in Iraq was "speculative." He also stood by his original position that the Geneva Conventions do not apply to prisoners captured in Afghanistan.

Yoo's response is misplaced. First, our petition is not an attack on academic freedom. It is explicitly worded as a response to official government actions taken by Yoo in his capacity as Deputy Assistant Attorney General. Yoo has been espousing his viewpoints as an academic for years, yet we never before called for his resignation. We mounted this petition only in response to recent media revelations regarding his official role.

Academic freedom protects viewpoints; it does not amount to immunity for immoral or illegal actions. If a professor commits a crime or behaves in a morally reprehensible way, the community has the right to demand accountability. If, as we believe, Yoo's actions as Deputy Assistant Attorney General amounted to aiding and abetting war crimes-or at the very least, a severe ethical lapse- then those actions absolutely demand accountability. Of course, our petition does not ask the administration to fire or discipline Yoo, and we have no power to do so ourselves. We are simply asking Yoo to act on his own behalf; he has the freedom to ignore us and he may espouse his viewpoints as freely as he wishes, just as he is doing now. His academic freedom is completely intact.

Second, one need not "speculate" about whether the abuse of Iraqi prisoners was a result of Yoo's position. There is much evidence that similar abuses have occurred to prisoners captured by the United States in Afghanistan as well.

The New York Times recently reported on deaths of Afghani prisoners held in U.S. custody at Bagram Airbase, which were officially ruled homicides as the result of blunt force trauma. Yoo's memo had advised the military that such actions would not result in convictions for war crimes as long as they were not "willfully" committed on innocent civilians, whom he described as "collateral damage." Clearly, the military took Yoo at his word. Yet he must have known, or very well should have known, that many innocent persons would be among those imprisoned. Moreover, Yoo continues to assert the legality of these prisons, despite the fact that the U.S. has failed to provide prisoners with a "competent tribunal" as required by the Geneva Conventions before deciding whether a prisoner is an illegal combatant unprotected by the treaty.

In the privileged ivory tower of academia, Yoo has every right to formulate his legal opinions with disregard for such realities. But in the real world, legal positions have real world consequences, as we are now discovering in the most unfortunate way. Those responsible for these consequences must be held accountable. We therefore repeat our demand to Yoo that he act on his own behalf and take responsibility for the harms he has facilitated.

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