The Torture Professor

Why UC Berkeley should fire John Yoo, the legal scholar whose work led to Abu Ghraib and secret spying on Americans.

In early 2008, the national spotlight focused on Berkeley as the city council proclaimed recruiters for the US Marines "unwelcome intruders." As antiwar liberals clashed with offended conservatives, the protests and counter-demonstrations splashed across the evening news. But all the attention was badly misdirected. Just a few blocks away, virtually unmolested by protesters or TV cameras, was John Yoo, a UC Berkeley law professor whose secret government work was more objectionable than anything Marine recruiters or Berkeley's city council could possibly have concocted.

Yoo, a tenured professor at Boalt Hall since 1999, is the author of the infamous "Torture Memos" — a set of repudiated legal opinions that led to prisoner abuses in US prisons at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, and elsewhere. Yoo wrote the memos for the Bush administration's Department of Justice while on leave of absence from UC Berkeley from 2001 to 2003. A staunch conservative, he also is believed to have laid the legal foundation for the nation's warrantless wiretapping program.

Yoo is now back at Boalt quietly teaching constitutional law, mostly overlooked by both the Bay Area media and anti-Bush activists. But in legal circles, both liberal and conservative scholars have sharply criticized the torture memos while engaging in online debates about whether he should be charged with war crimes, fired from Berkeley, or simply left alone. More