The problem with Yoo

Re “Memo to the next president,” Opinion, April 5

Tim Rutten mentions John C. Yoo as a “torture enabler” who provided the legal underpinning for immoral policies and unspeakable acts.

Rutten fails to mention that Yoo is now a law professor at UC Berkeley’s Boalt Hall School of Law, arguably the most distinguished law school in the University of California system. In this capacity, Yoo instructs young lawyers who may not be aware of his role in facilitating torture.

Yoo’s work in the Bush administration may have been technically brilliant, but it was morally reprehensible. I suggest that UC’s leadership publicly explain the circumstances surrounding Yoo’s appointment.

This is a not a matter of academic freedom; it is a matter of neglecting morality and justice in educating young lawyers.

Jerome Aroesty

Los Angeles

Supporters of President Bush can take heart. Perhaps those who deny evolution happily accept this devolution, this degeneration and regression of our body politic.

While our framers of the Constitution “were fundamentally products of the Age of Reason,” those presently in power want to prove to the world that our government is inept through their corrupt, evil and carefully crafted plan to destroy our constitutional rights and leave our country in a moribund state for the next administration.

In Yoo, they found their Igor. Although he failed to get Bush a brain, in his torture memo of 2003, Yoo facilitated the disgrace of our country, leaving the next administration a disaster on a lead platter.

This toxic waste will be hard to dispose of.

Carol Sils

Woodland Hills

Yoo wrote the torture memos that essentially justified harsh treatment of terrorist suspects.

Bush eventually disavowed the memos, but not before detainees in Guantanamo, Iraq and Afghanistan were tortured.

Subsequently, Yoo wrote numerous articles justifying his legal reasoning. The fact that torture cost the U.S. an enormous amount of moral standing never entered Yoo’s thinking.

I understand that Yoo teaches law at Berkeley. What exactly is he teaching?

Donna Handy

Santa Barbara