Geburtsdatum | Montag, 10. Juli 1967 |
Geburtsort | South_Korea |
Sternzeichen | |
Beschreibung | John Choon Yoo (Korean: 유준; born July 10, 1967) is a Korean-born American legal scholar and former government official who serves as the Emanuel S. Heller Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley. He became known for his legal opinions in the early 2000s concerning executive power, warrantless wiretapping, and the Geneva Conventions while serving in the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) of the Department of Justice during the George W. Bush administration. Yoo was the author of the controversial "Torture Memos" set to determine the legal limits for the torture of detainees during the War on Terror after the September 11 attacks. |
Once the attacks occur, as we learned on Sept. 11, it is too late. It makes little sense to deprive ourselves of an important, and legal, means to detect and prevent terrorist attacks while we are still in the middle of a fight to the death with al Qaeda.
While Taliban fighters had an initial claim to protection under the conventions, they lost POW status by failing to obey the standards of conduct for legal combatants: wearing uniforms, a responsible command structure, and obeying the laws of war.
Human-rights advocates, for example, claim that the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners is of a piece with President Bush's 2002 decision to deny al Qaeda and Taliban fighters the legal status of prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions.
The effort to blur the lines between Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib reflects a deep misunderstanding about the different legal regimes that apply to Iraq and the war against al Qaeda.
