indepublica

Mr. Yoo’s 2001 legal opinion was revealed last week thanks to a 2003 Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by the ACLU. The full memo, to which this is literally a footnote, is 81 pages in length and provides information on the detention and interrogation of prisoners in U.S. custody overseas. This footnote references a separate and still secret memo entitled “Authority for Use of Military Force to Combat Terrorist Activities Within the United States.” Read more about this little gem over at TPM and the Washington Post.

Interestingly, John Yoo is now teaching law at UC Berkeley. If one were interested in contacting the Dean, any of the Associate Deans, or Mr. Yoo’s colleagues for any reason, their email addresses are listed here.

[UPDATE] April 10, 2008: Today’s Senate Appropriations Committee hearing featured an interesting exchange between Mukasey and Senator Feinstein regarding this very memo. The Attorney General had obvious dificulty answering a very pointed yes or no question: “Is the October 2001 OLC opinion still considered binding by the Department of Justice?”

[UPDATE] April 11, 2008: From The National Lawyer’s Guild “John Yoo should be disbarred and he should not be retained as a professor of law at one of the country’s premier law schools. John Yoo should be dismissed from Boalt Hall and tried as a war criminal.”