John Yoo did his most notorious damage as deputy assistant attorney general for the Bush administration's Office of Legal Counsel, where his legal opinions were used to justify torture. Yet he is still a professor at UC Berkeley's Boalt Law School. Act Against Torture has been participating in protests against the sheltering of this war criminal under the pretext of academic freedom for some years, and got some attention in the press and blogosphere when we called a protest at the Boalt graduation on the morning of May 17, 2008 to demand he be fired, disbarred, and prosecuted for his criminal lawyering as a Bush administration official. (See photos in our photo gallery page.)

Yoo's legal brief of March 14, 2003, advising the White House how it could get away with torture, was released to the public in April 2008. Jameel Jaffer, director of the ACLU's national security project, said Yoo's legal reasoning puts "literally no limit at all to the kinds of interrogation methods that the president can authorize. [...] The memo was meant to allow torture, and that's exactly what it did." In the wake of the memo's release, the National Lawyer's Guild has called for Yoo's dismissal from his position at UC Berkeley, his disbarment, and his prosecution for war crimes. The Center for Constitutional Rights has released a letter in support of this call.