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John Yoo

From dKosopedia

Contents

Background

While serving as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel, John Yoo was the principal author of the August 2002 Torture Memo which backed a view of Presidential power unprecedented in U.S. history in which the President is above the law. He is reported to gave generated large numbers of still secret legal memoranda that have helped undermine American adherence to the rule of law. He is one of the great disgraces to the legal profession in modern times.

Born in 1967, Yoo immigrated from South Korea to the United States as a child with his parents. They indoctrinated him in conservative anti-communism. He attended Harvard University as an undergrad and graduated from Yale Law School in 1992. He appears to have learned early on that one succeeds by telling the powerful what they want to hear.

Post 9/11

Yoo wrote an internal memo urging that the executive use "electronic surveillance techniques and equipment that are more powerful and sophisticated than those available to law enforcement agencies in order to intercept telephonic communications and observe the movement of persons but without obtaining warrants for such use." (Risen 1, p. 57) He gave de facto recognition to the evasive nature of the policy with regard to constitutional issues when he said, "The government may be justified in taking measures which in less troubled times could be seen as infringements of individual liberties." (Risen 1, p. 58)

On FISA and Warrantless Wiretapping

On December 9, 2003, John Yoo co-wrote an Op-Ed for the Wall Street Journal praising the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 and the Patriot Act:

'The Patriot Act's most controversial provisions concern electronic surveillance of individuals who threaten national security. But the act did not initiate this practice. The system of secret search and wiretap warrants, granted in a secret hearing by a group of federal judges, without notice to the target, was established 25 years ago by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.'

'FISA was passed because before 1978 authorities could conduct searches to stop threats to national security without any judicial warrants at all. No court has ever found FISA to be unconstitutional, and just last year a special panel of federal appeals court judges reviewed the Patriot Act's central modificationof FISA and unanimously found it constitutional.'

We now know that the NSA had been violating these laws for more than 2 years when this article was written, and that its justifications for breaking the law were provided by John Yoo in a classified legal opinion.

Some Non-Secret Writings

References

Affiliations

External Links

Retrieved from "http://localhost../../../j/o/h/John_Yoo_6870.html"

This page was last modified 14:39, 25 July 2007 by dKosopedia user Corncam. Based on work by Andrew Oh-Willeke and dKosopedia user(s) Allamakee Democrat, Patrick0Moran, BartFraden, Renegade, Doomdaymassacre, Jbet777 and Kagro X. Content is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.


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