Re: Charles Carreon, The Arizona Kid
Posted: Mon Oct 14, 2013 7:09 am
BERKELEY DEAN SEES NO ETHICAL PROBLEM IN YOO'S PRO-TORTURE TEACHINGS, by Charles Carreon
04/14/08:
I posted yesterday about the campaign to fire John Yoo from Boalt Hall, the UC Berkeley Law School that has given sanctuary to this international criminal. After receiving 7,000 emails, finally Christopher Edley, Dean of the Law School wrote a response defending his decision not to fire Yoo, claiming that it was a matter of “academic freedom,” and that, applying the school tenure policy, Yoo hadn't been shown to have committed any “professional misconduct” as a government lawyer that was “material” to his work as a law school professor. This, my legal and lay friends, is pure poppycock! Here's my response, and below it, the Dean's apologia pro tortura.
The Dean's excuse-making is copied below:
04/14/08:
I posted yesterday about the campaign to fire John Yoo from Boalt Hall, the UC Berkeley Law School that has given sanctuary to this international criminal. After receiving 7,000 emails, finally Christopher Edley, Dean of the Law School wrote a response defending his decision not to fire Yoo, claiming that it was a matter of “academic freedom,” and that, applying the school tenure policy, Yoo hadn't been shown to have committed any “professional misconduct” as a government lawyer that was “material” to his work as a law school professor. This, my legal and lay friends, is pure poppycock! Here's my response, and below it, the Dean's apologia pro tortura.
Dear Dean Edley:
I have read your response to the public outcry against the continued employment of John Yoo, and find it wholly unconvincing. You define the scope of Mr. Yoo's activity all too understandingly.
If Mr. Yoo had written torture memos for the Gotti Family enforcers, teaching them how to inflict pain greater than kneecapping that inflicted no visible injuries, in order to extort payment for unlawful debts, would that be “clear professional misconduct?”
Suppose Mr. Yoo had written a manual for drug couriers, teaching them how to specifically carry just under the amounts of drugs that trigger mandatory minimums in the sentencing rules, would that be “clear professional misconduct?”
You did not cite even one Rule of Professional Conduct in your analysis. California Rule of Professional Conduct has Rule 3-200, entitled “Prohibited Objectives of Employment,” that reads like this:Rule 3-200. Prohibited Objectives of Employment
A member shall not seek, accept, or continue employment if the member knows or should know that the objective of such employment is:
(A) To bring an action, conduct a defense, assert a position in litigation, or take an appeal, without probable cause and for the purpose of harassing or maliciously injuring any person; or
(B) To present a claim or defense in litigation that is not warranted under existing law, unless it can be supported by a good faith argument for an extension, modification, or reversal of such existing law.
The objective of Mr. Yoo’s employment was to aid terrorism hunters and prosecutors to extort evidence from people using torture, without any finding of probable cause that they had committed any crime at all. Since Mr. Yoo’s torture victims need only to be possessed of information that might save lives, they need not be criminals to suffer administration of pain to enhance their memory. Mr. Yoo’s analyses abrogate the need for probable cause when the Decider decides to lower the boom on terrorists. Mr. Yoo’s analyses also abrogates the concept that confessions are only admissible when “knowingly and voluntarily given,” as I was taught to apply in Criminal Procedure in law school, and again when I was a public prosecutor in Oregon, and again as a Federal Public Defender in the District of Oregon. If Mr. Yoo had tried to argue against these positions in open court, he would have been called an idiot, and derided by criminal practitioners of any experience. Instead, Mr. Yoo made these pronouncements in secret, to government bosses blinded by the lure of gaining the power that gangsters and thugs use to overpower their enemies, defiling these sacred legal traditions for the very purpose of creating an arguable legal shield for the vilest of human conduct – the deliberate infliction of pain to extort statements from the unwilling.
It cannot be necessary for me to push doggedly through every line of Rule 3-200 for you to see the fallacy of your argument. You know Mr. Yoo violated his professional ethics by becoming a mouthpiece for legal “doctrines” so far out of the mainstream that they could only be called delusional. You don’t try to deny that Mr. Yoo committed ethical misconduct, because you would be justly derided if you did.
So instead you resort to pettifoggery, the insertion of a restrictive clause in this sentence: “Was there clear professional misconduct - that is, some breach of the professional ethics applicable to a government attorney - material to Professor Yoo's academic position?” You are tacitly arguing what is wrong as a matter of ethics law – that Mr. Yoo’s professional misconduct as a government lawyer is not “material” to Professor Yoo’s “academic position.” Any unethical act by an attorney bears on every aspect of their performance of professional duties. An attorney who breaches his professional duties is never exonerated, not by time, a change of job, or any other cosmetic alteration.
You can protect Mr. Yoo and his government salary for as long as you want. But one thing you won’t do is convince me that you have submitted his conduct to any type of serious scrutiny. Your excuses are as lacking in rigor as Yoo’s analyses, and you don’t even have the threat of terrorism to justify your sophistic dodges.
You have illuminated no point of academic freedom in your misnamed apologia for a torturer, and instead have made it clear that, for one reason or another, this miserable excuse for a lawyer is being coddled by the University of California. As a former UCLA alumnus, I will register my protest long and loud. And I am not alone. Protect your pet torturer if you will. Justice will find him at last.
The Dean's excuse-making is copied below:
The Torture Memos and Academic Freedom
Christopher Edley, Jr.
The Honorable William H. Orrick, Jr. Distinguished Chair and Dean
UC Berkeley Law School
While serving in the Department of Justice, Professor John Yoo wrote memoranda that officials used as the legal basis for policies concerning detention and interrogation techniques in our efforts to combat terrorism. Both the subject and his reasoning are controversial, leading the New York Times (editorial, April 4), the National Lawyers' Guild, and hundreds of individuals from around the world to criticize or at least question Professor Yoo's continuing employment at U.C. Berkeley Law School. As dean, but speaking only for myself, I offer the following explanation, although with no expectation that it will be completely satisfying to anyone.
Professor Yoo began teaching at Berkeley Law in 1993, received tenure in 1999, and then took a leave of absence to work in the Bush Administration. He returned in 2004, and remains a very successful teacher and prolific (though often controversial) scholar. Because this is a public university, he enjoys not only security of employment and academic freedom, but also First Amendment and Due Process rights.
It seems we do need regular reminders: These protections, while not absolute, are nearly so because they are essential to the excellence of American universities and the progress of ideas. Indeed, in Berkeley's classrooms and courtyards our community argues about the legal and moral issues with the intensity and discipline these crucial issues deserve. Those who prefer to avoid these arguments - be they left or right or lazy - will not find Berkeley or any other truly great law school a wholly congenial place to study. For that we make no apology.
Did what Professor Yoo wrote while not at the University somehow place him beyond the pale of academic freedom today? Had this been merely some professor vigorously expounding controversial and even extreme views, we would be in a familiar drama with the usual stakes. Had that professor been on leave marching with Nazis in Skokie or advising communists during the McCarthy era, reasonable people would probably find that an easier case still. Here, additional things are obviously in play. Gravely so.
My sense is that the vast majority of legal academics with a view of the matter disagree with substantial portions of Professor Yoo's analyses, including a great many of his colleagues at Berkeley. If, however, this strong consensus were enough to fire or sanction someone, then academic freedom would be meaningless.
There are important questions about the content of the Yoo memoranda, about tortured definitions of “torture”, about how he and his colleagues conceived their role as lawyers, and about whether and when the Commander in Chief is subject to domestic statutes and international law. We press our students to grapple with these matters, and in the legal literature Professor Yoo and his critics do battle. One can oppose and even condemn an idea, but I don't believe that in a university we can fearfully refuse to look at it. That would not be the best way to educate, nor a promising way to seek deeper understanding in a world of continual, strange revolutions.
There is more, however. Having worked in the White House under two presidents, I am exceptionally sensitive to the complex, ineffable boundary between policymaking and law-declaring. I know that Professor Yoo continues to believe his legal reasoning was sound, but I do not know whether he believes that the Department of Defense and CIA made political or moral mistakes in the way they exercised the discretion his memoranda purported to find available to them within the law. As critical as I am of his analyses, no argument about what he did or didn't facilitate, or about his special obligations as an attorney, makes his conduct morally equivalent to that of his nominal clients, Secretary Rumsfeld, et al., or comparable to the conduct of interrogators distant in time, rank and place. Yes, it does matter that Yoo was an adviser, but President Bush and his national security appointees were the deciders.
What troubles me substantively with the analyses in the memoranda is that they reduce the Rule of Law to the Reign of Politics. I believe there is much more to the separation of powers than the promise of ultimate remedies like the ballot box and impeachment, even in the case of a Commander in Chief during war. And I believe that the revolution in sensibilities after 9/11 demands greater, not reduced, vigilance for constitutional rights and safeguards. What of the argument made by so many critics that Professor Yoo was so wrong on these sensitive issues that it amounted to an ethical breach. It is true, I believe, that government lawyers have a larger, higher client than their political supervisors; there are circumstances when a fair reading of the law must - perhaps as an ethical matter? - provide a bulwark to political and bureaucratic discretion. And it shouldn't require a private plaintiff and a Supreme Court ruling to make it so. Few professions require an oath at entry, but law does. Oaths must mean something.
Assuming one believes as I do that Professor Yoo offered bad ideas and even worse advice during his government service, that judgment alone would not warrant dismissal or even a potentially chilling inquiry. As a legal matter, the test here is the relevant excerpt from the “General University Policy Regarding Academic Appointees”, adopted for the 10-campus University of California by both the system-wide Academic Senate and the Board of Regents:
Types of unacceptable conduct: … Commission of a criminal act which has led to conviction in a court of law and which clearly demonstrates unfitness to continue as a member of the faculty. [Academic Personnel Manual sec. 015]
This very restrictive standard is binding on me as dean, but I will put aside that shield and state my independent and personal view of the matter. I believe the crucial questions in view of our university mission are these: Was there clear professional misconduct - that is, some breach of the professional ethics applicable to a government attorney - material to Professor Yoo's academic position? Did the writing of the memoranda, and his related conduct, violate a criminal or comparable statute?
Absent very substantial evidence on these questions, no university worthy of distinction should even contemplate dismissing a faculty member. That standard has not been met.
April 10, 2008