It’s expected for a lawmaker in the beginning of a new election cycle to get a little more active, with high-profile articulations of positions on key issues.  So it is for Sen. Barbara Boxer.  In the past week, she has released a report on the statewide recession, featuring interviews with local officials from all 58 counties; demanding that Attorney General Mukasey intervene to reverse a “blatantly illegal” memo by EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson claiming that carbon dioxide is not a pollutant (the Supreme Court has already ruled that it is); and most interesting to me, wrote a letter to incoming Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chair John Kerry calling for hearings on the Bush Administration’s use of torture, as well as an outside commission to investigate it:

I write today to raise an issue of the utmost significance — the Administration’s use of torture against detainees held in U.S. custody. Despite widespread condemnation from Members of Congress, policy experts, and human rights advocates, Vice President Richard Cheney stated in a recent interview with ABC News that the torture policies used against detainees were appropriate and admitted that he played a role in their authorization. In fact, when asked if any of the tactics — including waterboarding — went too far, he responded with a curt “I don’t.”

I find Vice President Cheney’s response deplorable, particularly in light of a recent report released by the Senate Armed Services Committee following an eighteen-month investigation. In sum, the bipartisan report found that “senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees.” The report, led by Senate Armed Services Chairman Carl Levin, concluded that “those efforts damaged our ability to collect accurate intelligence that could save lives, strengthened the hand of our enemies, and compromised our moral authority.” I fully support Chairman Levin’s proposal for an outside Commission with subpoena power to investigate this matter further.

The whole letter is here.  This is one step away from the needed call for an independent prosecutor to investigate Bush’s war crimes, but it’s as close as any Senator has been willing to go.  This suggests that Boxer considers an investigation of this nature to not only be the right thing to do in a democracy, but not electorally damaging whatsoever.  She should be supported in this belief and encouraged to go even further.  I know that Senator Boxer has begun asking for contributions to her re-election campaign.  Maybe a series of contributions of $9.12, signaling support for a “9/12” torture commission and an independent prosecutor, along with emails and letters explaining this, would relay the message?

At my home site I took a look today at John Yoo’s recently declassified memo, which is more responsible for torture and detainee abuse at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and throughout American prison sites abroad than practically any other document.

If you’re interested in weeping, you can read the 81-page memo yourself.

Part 1

Part 2

Yoo simply made up a new set of executive powers that trumped the Geneva Conventions, domestic statutes against torture, and virtually the whole system of the law itself.

If a government defendant were to harm an enemy combatant during an interrogation in a manner that might arguably violate a criminal prohibition, he would be doing so in order to prevent further attacks on the United States by the al Qaeda terrorist network. In that case, we believe that he could argue that the executive branch’s constitutional authority to protect the nation from attack justified his actions.

Kind of a “self-defense before the fact” belief, completely contrary to how the American legal system works […] The closed loop here is self-perpetuating.  The DoJ writes a memo saying that the President has virtually unlimited power in wartime.  The CIA and the Pentagon then takes the memo and uses it as proof of legality for their crimes.  So we have an executive branch validating the rest of the executive branch, essentially a one-branch government that writes, executes and adjudicates the law.

There is no question that John Yoo is a war criminal; he provided the legal theories that the executive branch follows to this day, even though the Defense Department vacated this particular memo in 2003.

Elsewhere in the piece I noted that Berkeley must be exceedingly proud.  Yoo is a tenured law professor who has been teaching at the University of California since leaving the Justice Department.  The UC, as we know, is a public university system paid for with 3.2% of the general fund budget.  Full professors there can earn up to $164,700 a year annually.

That comes out of my hide.  Your hide.  John Yoo is making his living based on public payments through taxes and other receipts.  And he is absolutely a war criminal.  (over)

John Yoo’s Memorandum, as intended, directly led to — caused — a whole series of war crimes at both Guantanamo and in Iraq. The reason such a relatively low-level DOJ official was able to issue such influential and extraordinary opinions was because he was working directly with, and at the behest of, the two most important legal officials in the administration: George Bush’s White House counsel, Alberto Gonzales, and Dick Cheney’s counsel (and current Chief of Staff) David Addington. Together, they deliberately created and authorized a regime of torture and other brutal interrogation methods that are, by all measures, very serious war crimes.

If writing memoranda authorizing torture — actions which then directly lead to the systematic commission of torture — doesn’t make one a war criminal in the U.S., what does?

I believe in academic freedom and understand the slippery slope of removing a faculty member with tenure because of their political views.  In a best-case scenario The Hague would be making the decision of when John Yoo leaves his cushy law professor job by dragging him off in leg irons.  But failing that, there has to be at least some standard of competence and dignity among a public university.  The shoddy logic and faulty reasoning in this declassified memo should be a firing offense alone; and the implications of that memo should be more than enough to cement that.  Not only is John Yoo teaching your kids about the Constitution and the law, we’re all paying him to do it.  And so at the very least the UC Regents need to hear from everyone in California, expressing their disappointment that they are harboring a war criminal at their flagship school, and determining what they will seek to do about that.

UPDATE: The American Freedom Campaign has a petition you can sign to demand this abuse of executive power.  It’s astonishing that it took the ACLU to force declassification of this memo rather than oversight from the Congress or the media.  As the AFC says, “Prosecutions may be appropriate.  Impeachment should not be out of the question.  But what is needed immediately is a thorough investigation into the Bush administration’s understanding of the extent of the president’s power as commander-in-chief. “