Yoo to Appeal Ruling That Greenlit Torture Lawsuit

Former Bush administration lawyer John Yoo will appeal a federal judge's ruling that allowed a prisoner to sue him for devising the legal theories that led to his alleged torture, Yoo's attorneys said Monday.

President Obama's Justice Department, which represented Yoo in unsuccessfully seeking dismissal of the suit, filed a notice saying he would ask the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco to intervene in the case. Department attorneys also said they were dropping the case and that Yoo was now represented by a private lawyer, not identified in the court document.

Yoo, a UC Berkeley law professor, was a Justice Department attorney from 2001 to 2003 and wrote a series of memos on interrogation, detention and presidential powers. One of his memos, which he wrote in 2002, said treatment of captives amounted to torture only if it caused the same level of pain as "organ failure, impairment of bodily function or even death."

The suit was filed by Jose Padilla, a U.S. citizen now serving a 17-year prison sentence after being convicted of conspiring to provide money and supplies to Islamic extremist groups.
His suit covers his imprisonment in a Navy brig, where he was held without charges for thee years and eight months after he was arrested in Chicago in 2002. Then-Attorney General John Ashcroft accused him of plotting with al Qaeda to detonate a radioactive "dirty bomb," allegations that were later dropped.

Padilla said in his suit that he had been subjected to extremes of light and temperature, confined in painful positions and threatened with death. He alleged that Yoo, who has acknowledged being part of a Bush administration planning group, reviewed and approved his treatment and provided legal cover.

Read More At SFGate

Man Convicted of Terrorism Free to Sue Yoo Over Torture

A man serving a 17-year prison sentence for terrorist activities has been given the green light to sue a former US government lawyer who wrote memos that allegedly led to his torture, US media reports said Sunday.

Jose Padilla, a US citizen arrested in 2002 for an alleged "dirty bomb" plot only to have the charges dropped three years later, was jailed in January 2008 for separate charges of providing support to the Al-Qaeda terror network.

Lawyers for Padilla have filed a lawsuit against John Yoo, a former lawyer in the George W. Bush administration, arguing that he was responsible for crafting the legal memos which led to his detention and harsh interrogation.

Padilla, who was held in solitary confinement as an "enemy combatant" for more than three years at a US Navy installation in Charleston, South Carolina, alleges he was tortured.

Padilla's lawsuit, which demands Yoo be held accountable for his treatment, alleges he suffered "gross physical and psychological abuse at the hands of federal officials as part of a systematic program of abusive interrogation intended to break down Mr Padilla's humanity and his will to live."

Read More At AFP

The 13 people who made torture possible

The Bush administration's Torture 13. They authorized it, they decided how to implement it, and they crafted the legal fig leaf to justify it.

On April 16, the Obama administration released four memos that were used to authorize torture in interrogations during the Bush administration. When President Obama released the memos, he said, "It is our intention to assure those who carried out their duties relying in good faith upon legal advice from the Department of Justice that they will not be subject to prosecution."

Yet 13 key people in the Bush administration cannot claim they relied on the memos from the DOJ's Office of Legal Counsel. Some of the 13 manipulated the federal bureaucracy and the legal process to "preauthorize" torture in the days after 9/11. Others helped implement torture, and still others helped write the memos that provided the Bush administration with a legal fig leaf after torture had already begun.

Read More At Salon.com

Judge: Ex-Bush lawyer can be sued over torture

A prisoner who says he was tortured while being held for nearly four years as a suspected terrorist can sue former Bush administration lawyer John Yoo for coming up with the legal theories that justified his alleged treatment, a federal judge in San Francisco ruled Friday.

U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White's decision marks the first time a government lawyer has been held potentially responsible for the abuse of detainees.

If Padilla, now serving a 17-year prison sentence on terrorism charges, can prove his allegations, he can show that Yoo "set in motion a series of events that resulted in the deprivation of Padilla's constitutional rights," White said.

Read More At SF Chronicle

Philadelphia Inquirer Hires Torture Memo Author John Yoo to Write Column!!

The letters to the editorial page of the Philadelphia Inquirer are on fire. People are writing in, overwhelmingly opposed to the newspaper’s hiring of John Yoo as a columnist, the former Justice Department lawyer who helped write what’s come to be known as the torture memo that claimed the treatment of prisoners amounted to torture only if it caused the same level of pain as “organ failure, impairment of bodily function or even death.”

WILL BUNCH: I think a problem going back to the Bush’s first term is the media normalizing torture, that makes something like torture, which not only is illegal under a law that was signed by Ronald Reagan, among others, but, is clearly immoral, to make this a kind of a one-hand-on-the-other-hand debate, like it’s something like mass transit funding or something like that. And it’s not.

I think newspapers have a role to reflect the moral positions of their community. Nobody would argue giving a regular monthly column to somebody who advocated something like racial discrimination, for example, or something like—that would be so far out of the mainstream. And I think we need to put torture in that same category.

Read More At Democracy Now!

Spanish judge accuses six top Bush officials of torture

Criminal proceedings have begun in Spain against six senior officials in the Bush administration for the use of torture against detainees in Guantánamo Bay. Baltasar Garzón, the counter-terrorism judge whose prosecution of General Augusto Pinochet led to his arrest in Britain in 1998, has referred the case to the chief prosecutor before deciding whether to proceed.

The case is bound to threaten Spain's relations with the new administration in Washington, but Gonzalo Boyé, one of the four lawyers who wrote the lawsuit, said the prosecutor would have little choice under Spanish law but to approve the prosecution."It will be against the law not to go ahead."

The officials named in the case include the most senior legal minds in the Bush administration. They are: Alberto Gonzales, a former White House counsel and attorney general; David Addington, former vice-president Dick Cheney's chief of staff; Douglas Feith, who was under-secretary of defence; William Haynes, formerly the Pentagon's general counsel; and John Yoo and Jay Bybee, who were both senior justice department legal advisers.

Court documents say that, without their legal advice in a series of internal administration memos, "it would have been impossible to structure a legal framework that supported what happened [in Guantánamo]".

Read More At the Guardian