Sunday, May 18, 2008

Torture, Berkeley and John Yoo

I know people who are very good at word games. I also know people who shudder when they realize that they are capable of arguing any point and they have to stop and think about what that means and what the implications are. Around the world, all kinds of behavior can be justified for the flimsiest of reasons. Sometimes those flimsy reasons can be dressed up in very fancy language. But there comes a point when basic human rights and human values are violated by legal arguments that are simply political rationalizations. That the Bush administration had to look around for a lawyer to rationalize torture says something about the values of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. John Yoo was one of those lawyers and he now teaches at UC Berkeley. Brad DeLong, an economics professor at Berkeley, has a no-nonsense post on the issue (hat tip to Steve Clemons of The Washington Note):
I cannot help but think that it is time for some appropriate arm of the university that is expert enough to have an informed view to consider the matter, and to advise me and the rest of the faculty (a) why John's memo of March 14, 2003 does not, despite appearances, rise to the level of participating in a conspiracy to torture goatherds from Afghanistan who have been sold to the military by clan enemies falsely claiming they are members of Al Qaeda; and (b) why John's memo of March 14, 2003, does not, despite appearances, constitute a breach of the duty of a lawyer to his clients (in this case, the majors and colonels of the U.S. army who did the torturing) of a level equivalent to that of the falsification of evidence in a scholarly work--or to say (c) that in spite of substantial evidence of participation in a conspiracy to torture innocent goatherds and to deceive the majors and colonels who were his clients and acted in reliance on his advice, the Kantorowicz freedom-of-academic-speech position still applies.

Read the comments. Many of them are just as informed as DeLong's post. We need to be careful that we don't keep kicking ball down the road instead of dealing with some of the most critical issues of our time.

Labels: ,

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home