Speaking to the issue of John Yoo’s memos, which provide the legal justification for torture, Linda Rigas, a student/organizer affiliated with the “Fire John Yoo!” campaign, offered insight on John Yoo and how a group of activists from the World Can’t Wait and other citizen groups are pressing for justice and consequences for the legal memos Yoo produced.
The “Fire John Yoo!” campaign began when it became evident that there was a need to actually confront John Yoo at Boalt Hall at UC Berkeley.
Rigas explained when Yoo decided to write memos for the Bush Administration he “left Boalt Hall to go work in the Office of Legal Counsel, which is the Supreme Court of the Executive Branch” which “makes the laws that the Executive then puts forth and brings to Congress for approval.”
Yoo returned to Boalt Hall to continue teaching UC Berkeley students classes on law.
“I think that John Yoo continuing to hold a place of legitimacy within an academic institution actually has really dangerous implications for the future of legality and for the future of how the Constitution will be read,” said Rigas.
Rigas believes the fact that Yoo has been able “to continue propagating and arguing his position under the unitary executive power is actually quite dangerous."
“This can already be seen with the fact that John Yoo doesn’t just lecture to Boalt Hall. He lectures to other law students throughout the country. Right now he’s a visiting professor at Chapman under a distinguished position,” said Rigas.
Sharon Adams, a lawyer affiliated with the National Lawyers Guild (NLG) who operates out of California, supports NLG efforts to have John Yoo disbarred and would like to see Yoo fired from his job as a law professor and prosecuted. She’s sympathetic to the “Fire John Yoo!” campaign that activists are waging in San Francisco.
Adams happens to think the reason Yoo is a visiting professor at Chapman University this semester is because John Yoo was asked to get out of town because the protests were mounting up and Berkeley no longer wanted protests on the campus. She thinks the college advised him to “just quietly go to this conservative university and hopefully things [would] die down.”
According to Adams, Yoo was going to have a talk at Berkeley on March 12th that was postponed indefinitely, which shows that the group of activists applying pressure to John Yoo have a lot of grassroots power right now.
So, when did this “Fire John Yoo!” campaign start and what is it all about?
Rigas went to Berkeley last summer to work with the “Fire John Yoo!” campaign that had formed. She says the first big action it engaged in was at the 2008 Boalt Hall graduation.
“[Activists] had orange jumpsuits and posters and they really confronted the idea that people were graduating having gone through Yoo’s classes and were going to enter the profession of law. There were students who did not support the fact that their parents were going to have to walk through a group of people who were actually taking this on,” explained Rigas.
The campaign followed the action with a town hall meeting to discuss what it meant to have John Yoo teaching at Berkeley in the community. The group further organized and paid for a billboard to be put up that said “Silence + Torture = Complicity” and had the World Can’t Wait website listed below. And, months following the summer actions, as a result of the activists’ pressure on Yoo and Berkeley, the Berkeley City Council passed a nonbinding resolution dealing with John Yoo.
The campaign essentially centers around the fact that he was arguing for "law in the service of empire" and should not be allowed to hide from consequences by taking advantage of his status in an academic institution like UC Berkeley.
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