| John Yoo  AKA John Choon Yoo
Born: 10-Jun-1967
Birthplace: Seoul, South Korea
Gender: Male
Race or Ethnicity: Asian
Sexual orientation: Straight
Occupation: Government
Party Affiliation: Republican [1] Nationality: United States
Executive summary: Thinks Geneva Conventions are obsolete Former clerk for Laurence H. Silberman at the Court of Appeals, and later for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas 1994-95. Served as Deputy Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel at the DOJ 2001-03, where wrote substantial parts of the PATRIOT act with Viet Dinh, and he co-authored a report that basically trashed the Geneva Conventions. He is now a law professor at U.C. Berkeley's Boalt Hall Law School.
The forty-two page memo in question, which he authored in January 2002, stipulated that since Afghanistan has no formal government to speak of, neither the Geneva Convention nor any other laws of war apply. This breaks a fifty-year U.S. military tradition of upholding those rules, rules that we adopted because we expect them to be applied to us. When the U.S. state department read Yoo's memo, they were "horrified", their chief legal advisor calling it "seriously flawed." But George W. Bush approved the policies in the memo, ultimately resulting in the Abu Ghraib fiasco and similar atrocities being committed in other Iraqi prisons as well as those in Afghanistan.
Other related memos discuss how to avoid prosecution of War Crimes that are expected to be committed by Americans following these policies, though it is not clear whether Yoo had a hand in authoring those.
Among his other zingers are quotes like "There is no constitutional right to privacy of records not in your possession" (said at a University of Virginia conference) and another on the PATRIOT Act, "It seems to me a very modest bill. There is no revolutionary change."
Yoo occasionally appears on news programs such as Lehrer News Hour as a talking head (at least one time with Scott Horton as foil), largely defending Bush administration policies. With all these wonderful ideas coming out of his head Yoo still feels he has enough credibility to author a book on Constitutional law.
[1] Interview with the Angel Symoon Brewer, Cal Patriot, February 2004: "I've always been a registered Republican, since I could vote."
Wife: Elsa Arnett (dau. of Peter Arnett)
University: AB American History, Harvard University (1989)
Law School: JD, Yale Law School (1992)
Professor: Law, University of California at Berkeley (1993-)
US Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel (2001-03)
Office of Legal Counsel Assistant Attorney General
Congressional Staff General Counsel, Senate Judiciary Committee (1995-96)
Law Clerk for Clarence Thomas (1994-95)
Law Clerk for Laurence H. Silberman, US Court of Appeals
American Enterprise Institute Visiting Scholar
Federalist Society
Council on Foreign Relations
Institute for Corean-American Studies Fellow
National Constitution Center Distinguished Scholars Advisory Panel
Korean Ancestry
Author of books:
War, Peace, and the Constitution (2004)
The Powers of War and Peace: The Constitution and Foreign Affairs After 9/11 (2005)
War by Other Means: An Insider's Account of the War on Terror (2006)
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