Letters to the Editor
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@Legal scholars must do their job
To wit, Article 6 of the U.S. Constitution, in part: "... This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land,,,."
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False conflation
As a country, we have repeatedly endorsed what John Yoo enabled.
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I've noticed that many Americans have difficulty in distinguishing between their country and their government. I'd hoped that Glenn was smart enough to avoid that logical trap.
The government has repeatedly endorsed what John Yoo enabled. The country as a whole has not.
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Academic Freedom
As with other freedoms, I believe that academic freedom is something that is not applied in an evenhanded manner. Members of the establishment or those who advocate for them are granted extraordinary amounts of freedom while those who oppose it find their freedoms questioned.
The other day, a professor that I know through the peace movement told me about how he tried to create an organization of antiwar professors at the large university where he works. This professor knew many of the younger faculty members in his department and thought that they would be interested in advocating for peace in this way. When the early meetings of the group were poorly attended, he did some investigating and found out that a senior professor in the department had warned many of the younger professors that these types of political actions would hurt their ability to get tenure. I don’t believe that he intended this to be a threat as much as a friendly piece of advise. For those of you not familiar with the university system, denying a professor tenure is a huge deal, almost akin to threatening their job. Occurrences like this seriously undermine the principle of academic freedom.
In my experience, universities do afford their professors a comparably high degree of freedom yet the professors who support the establishment tend to get more support than those who oppose it. In this case, Berkeley is certainly going to the mat for Yoo. Partly, I think that this is because they fear the inevitable political backlash if they let him go. I doubt that Berkeley wants to spend the next few years weathering accusations of engaging in a political witch-hunt.
I have not included the name of the professor who told me the story or the name of the university in this comment but if there’s any doubt please email me and I can try and get his permission to do so.
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Do you recall the uproar
over Ward Churchill, former professor at the University of Colorado, and his essay about Sept. 11, "On the Justice of Roosting Chickens"? He said in that essay that the US bears much of the responsibility for the attacks because of our policies throughout the world. The hysteria these views engendered from the right were everywhere, even my 90 year old uncle in southern California vilified Churchill and called for his head. Churchill's writings and record were dissected until they found enough dirt and dubious dealings to justify his firing.
Here's hoping that John Yoo will come under similar scrutiny.
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Scapegoating Yoo?
I have a particular loathing for scapegoating -- were the Jews not scapegoated for thousands of years, and was their scapegoating not a factor in the Final Solution, and are Arabs not scapegoated today? -- and scapegoating Yoo for the crimes of the Busheviks is simply a stupid effort at mitigating the culpability of the Bigger Fish in this whole desultory exercise in National Will.
But... scapegoating has been successful in diverting attention from the real problems and the real crimes and the real necessity for National Reflection. Scapegoating Lyndie England and her cohorts at Abu Ghraib successfully diverted attention -- for quite a while -- from the whole rotten torture regime, and was even successful in masking the continuation of torture under color of United States' civil and military authority.
So scapegoating Yoo can be very useful for someone's interests, and the fact that there will be endless fruitless arguments over getting him out of Boalt Hall faculty as part of the scapegoating process will only continue the service of those interests.
Yoo is a made man, protected by many layers of official and unofficial guardians, and his obvious contempt for what you or I think of his legal, ethical, and moral compass is a sign of just how untouchable he believes himself to be, how untouchable he in fact is -- at least through the normal channels and processes.
Thankfully, I'm not seeing as much focus on Yoo alone as Glenn may see. Obviously, Yoo is culpable in a Nuremberg sense, but he is low enough ranking to be less of a priority than, say, Addington, Cheney, Rice, Powell, or Bush. However, even Glenn suggests those who have something to say to Yoo attend his public appearances and say it.
The lot of them -- eventually -- will have to face... something. Just what it will be is impossible to say at this moment. We are still in the midst of the regressive revolution the Busheviks launched against the Nation, its laws, customs, and culture. We don't know what specific will work against them, nor do we know what methods will successfully curb their excesses. We don't know for sure whether the tattered structure of Constitutional self-government is even salvageable at this point.
The fact that so much of the real criminality of the Bushevik Regime is being revealed now, as the Regime is supposedly winding down, is a clue. Facts that are being revealed in the media now were known (of course) and could have (and should have) been revealed previously, say when the torture regime was first revealed, but no. We had to wait until now. And in the speculation about why NOW, it has been suggested that Bush himself is the leaker of this information, or one of the leakers, and the point of it is to jam it in the faces of all those anti-Bush elements in America and to dare them to try to do something about it.
Since the Congress will not act, the courts won't, the military is not about to rock the boat, the Agencies are merely tools, and on and on, it is up to the People themselves to act, and the regime (rightly?) believes that isn't going to happen, either.
So they get away with it.
And laugh.
Just like Yoo.