In the latest legal contest over the treatment of detained terrorist suspects, attorneys for Jose Padilla filed a suit in a California federal district court this morning against John Yoo, the former deputy assistant Attorney General whose legal opinions formed the basis for Padilla's detention and the interrogation techniques used against him that the attorneys call torture.
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While in detention, Padilla alleges, in this suit and others filed previously, he was routinely subjected to torture that was authorized as legal and defensible by Yoo.
Those include being subjected to noxious odors, extreme temperatures, sleep and sensory depravation, and standing in painful stress positions in a fashion similar to the prisoners at Abu Ghraib. He also says he was given what he thought were hallucinogenic drugs, was routinely threatened with physical punishment, death, or translocation to Guantanamo, and forbade access to a Koran.
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The suit filed this morning in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California in San Francisco, turns the spotlight of blame on Yoo, the author of a series of legal memoranda known collectively as the "Torture Memos." Drafted in 2002, when Yoo was a deputy assistant Attorney General in the Justice Department, they provided the legal justification for the interrogation techniques used on suspected Al Qaeda operatives that many, from former generals to presidential candidates, have since decried as torture.
"John Yoo is the first person in American history to provide the legal authorization for the instiution of torture in the U.S.," said Jonathan Freiman, an attorney representing Padilla in the suit. "He [Yoo] was an absolutely essential part of what will be viewed by history as a group of rogue officials acting under cover of law to undermine fundamental rights.it never would have happened without the legal green light. That made it possible."
Being hoist by his own petard... or what goes around comes around... or what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander... If Yoo is found guilty, would he go to prison? And if in prison, can we take his declaration that some people are not covered by our laws and can be tortured?
2 comments:
Yoo is a deplorable person. (Yoo, not you.) Will Yoo one day be seen as the Bushists' Torquemada? I defend his right to voice his godawful opinions about the "unitary executive" (though I live in fear that someone will misunderstand the phrase as "Unitarian executive"), but he has no constitutional basis to implement his terrifying views. I do not wish to see him physically harmed, but I do want him out of government, before a court and (given the only just verdict) in jail for several decades. This man is a danger to the republic.
I am Hugh. You are me? No, I am HUGH! (From the movie What's Up, Doc?)
I don't want Yoo to experience torture, I want him to realize IN FULL how his tortured logic has actually maimed and killed people. I want him to realize he has become the evil Nazi scientist cackling to himself in his underground laboratory.
I want him to see for himself the completeness of his depravity.
That whould be torture enough for anyone who calls themselves human.
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