Rules for Targeted Killing... just the title of this New York Times opinion piece gives me the chills. How the hell did we get to the point where this is seriously discussed, the subject not repudiated out of hand? Murder is subject to the rule of jus cogens which, as with slavery and torture, allows no derogation.
November 2012 Archives
The hoods were a
permission -- Michael Broek 
"The Logic of Yoo" explores the ambiguities of language that lead to evil. In it, the main character is a paid plagiarizer, someone who uses language for unethical purposes. When a PhD student commissions him to write a paper on the Bush Administrations' John Yoo and the now infamous "torture memos", the writer is forced to confront the slippery dark that resides in all of us, our complicity in the creation of language, law, and the roots of cultural collusion. Starting with the student who wants to buy the paper, all the way to those hired to conduct waterboarding interrogations, the Plagiarizer/narrator comes to indict himself as well, because from under the "hood" of his own complacent complicity, he looks into a mirror and sees "Yoo." Street art of a hooded detainee by The 2 Tone Man
Boston Playwright's Theater, March 9, 2013
"John Yoo must be chuckling in his Berkeley office, as the unholy principles behind his once-maligned 'torture memos' are underwritten by the assassinations, bombings, and imprisonments of a Democratic president backed by the same grassroots who fought so passionately against the terrible wars and atrocities of the Bush era -- Jeff Schauer, voice of conscience from UC Berkeley
"The belief in the right of the United States to overthrow
democratically elected governments (Guatemala, Iran, Congo), to train and arm
insurgencies (Nicaragua), and to launch aggressive wars (Iraq) free of the
inconvenience of the law grows out of the nationalistic fervor of 'American
Exceptionalism.'
"There is nothing by the name of
'administration detention' in our laws, yet the U.S. is insisting that there
are a number of people who, while there is not enough evidence against them,
are a threat to U.S. national security -- Karzai spokesman Aimal
Faizi
"reliance on faith in
President Obama appears to be misplaced... it will take a massive social
struggle to change the torture policy of the U.S. -- Jeffrey Kaye
there has been such reinforcement of the previous political structure
that the form of the state has now changed, creating a hitherto unseen
modification of the relation between the authorities and the citizens of the
United States...
Talk is cheap. Excuses abound. Institutional accommodation for war crimes -- crimes against humanity -- has gone viral. The painful impotence of legal bodies to uphold the most basic international moral standards of behavior reveals the necessity for intervention by the overwhelming masses of people who know right from wrong.
Despite a proposal to investigate civilian deaths caused by the CIA and military's use of drones and other targeted killing programs, the United Nations General Assembly today preserved a seat on their Human Rights Council for the world's most hypocritical member.
As accomplices in the criminal activities of the Obama regime
solemnize the re-election of their 'Assassin-in-Chief' president, Berkeley Law commemorates a legacy of war crimes and human rights abuse.
Ten years of accommodation for the radical views of torture advocate John Yoo shames the institution and alumni alike.
What kind of intellectual environment has produced this kind of thinking?
"Today we are here to challenge Professor Christopher Edley, Jr, dean of Boalt Hall at the UC-Berkeley School of Law, as a former civil rights attorney, as well as the rest of the law faculty at Boalt Hall to respond to a national emergency. That national emergency is that their profession - the academic legal profession and the universities that have trained them - has produced an ideology that claims to justify what used to be considered crimes of totalitarian governments, namely arbitrary detention, torture, trials before military commissions without any civil due process, not just as emergency measures required during a state of war but as legally based on the United States Constitution. -- David Sylvester, 2006
An anti-war activist dressed as an Abu Ghraib prison inmate during a protest outside the UC Berkeley School of Law. Photo by Riya Bhattacharjee, Berkeley Daily Planet
"The 'fatal flaw' in our legal 'system' is that the 'law' may be used to destroy the Rule of Law. -- DWBartoo
UPDATE: Autopsy Report Ready
Jason Leopold tells the heartbreaking but inspiring story of one man's resistance to the torment of his captors
The detainee who died at the American military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, was a Yemeni man who had been ordered freed in 2010 by a Federal District Court judge but remained in captivity after the ruling was overturned by the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit last year...
Continue reading the face of indefinite detention.
With amoral cowards like John Yoo in charge, the
word "waterboarding" was deconstructed and shown not to be an outrage
upon human dignity. Words have no meaning, and neither do laws or treaties or
regulations. That is the license handed to these intellectually dishonest liars
and frauds...
Barack Obama went further [than George Bush] by claiming the power not merely to detain citizens without judicial review but to assassinate them. He has waged an unprecedented war on whistleblowers, dusting off Wilson's Espionage Act of 1917 to prosecute more than double the number of whistleblowers than all prior presidents combined. And he has draped his actions with at least as much secrecy, if not more so, than any president in US history.
UC Berkeley Billboard
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Events & Calendars
Important Reading
Physicians for Human RightsBroken Laws, Broken Lives
NLG White Paper
ON THE LAW OF TORTURE...
The President's Executioner
Detention and torture in Guantanamo
