John Yoo has received much press recently after releasing his new book, Crisis and Command. On Monday, January 11, Yoo will appear on the Daily Show to promote the book, purportedly a history of seizures of power by American presidents dating back to George Washington. As we reported yesterday, the Department of Justice’s internal ethics report on the Office of Legal Counsel lawyers, including John Yoo, who authored the “torture memos,” has still not been released.
Given the history of appearances by former DOJ officials on the show, we trust that Jon Stewart will not shy away from confronting Yoo over his authorship of the torture memos. We hope he will also focus on the need for accountability. There is strong political pressure, including within the Obama administration, not to look back - not to investigate. But how can we hold other countries accountable for acts of torture, and not ourselves? Americans have a right to know the facts about what U.S. government lawyers did to provide legal cover for torture. We must hold accountable those who led America astray to make sure this travesty of justice never happens again. For the facts about John Yoo and the torture memos, watch our short film Tortured Law.
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The literary magazine The Normal School published an article by Tom Bissell (contributing editor of Harper's magazine) in which John Yoo gets a first hand taste of the situation he promoted. Check out http://thenormalschool.com/ for a pdf.
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