The April 21 morning “terror memo” lawyer John Yoo
appeared at the Chapman University debate, President Barack Obama said it would be up to his attorney general whether to prosecute former Bush administration advisors like Yoo. Since that day in Memorial Hall, the heat has turned up on AG Eric Holder to push the case forward, the U.S. Senate is leaning toward its own probe and, as many believed would happen, Spain's top investigative judge formally launched a new
criminal investigation into allegations of torture at Guantánamo Bay
and other U.S. prison camps that will target the “possible material
authors, enablers and accomplices” of the illegal abuse of detainees.
In
his strongly worded court order, Judge Baltasar Garzón indicated that
he would investigate the role of high-level Bush administration
officials in what he called an “authorized and systematic plan for
torture and harsh treatment of people deprived of their freedom without
any charges and without the most basic elemental rights for detainees,
set forth and demanded by international treaties.”
Garzón did not name any specific Bush administration officials in his announcement, although he did say he is also seeking to have the criminal complaint of a Spanish
human-rights organization against the so-called “Bush Six” recently reassigned by the chief judge of the
Audiencia Nacional to Judge Eloy Velasco, referred back to him for
purposes of consolidation with his new preliminary investigation. The targets of that complaint are former
attorney general Alberto Gonzales, former chief of staff to the vice
president David Addington, former general counsel of the Department of
Defense William J. Haynes II, former undersecretary of Defense Douglas
J. Feith, former assistant attorney general and current federal judge
in California's ninth U.S. district Jay Bybee and Yoo, the former deputy assistant attorney general and now
professor of law at UC Berkeley.
Yoo spent the spring semester as a visiting professor at Chapman's School of Law. Debating presidential power against Chapman law professors and former federal prosecutors Katherine Darmer and Lawrence Rosenthal, Yoo said, “I do not endorse” an investigation into his role in the terror memos. His debate partner, Chapman law school dean John C. Eastman, also rejected the notion on grounds that the U.S. did not torture and what's actually in the memos is being misrepresented.
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OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.