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Torture memo’s author may face discipline from state bar
May 6th, 2009, 11:40 am · 68 Comments · posted by Teri Sforza, Register staff writer
Chapman University’s distinguished visiting professor of law could face disciplinary action - including reprimands or even disbarment - by the state bar association.
John Yoo - author of some of the harshest Bush administration memos justifying torture as an interrogation tactic - is one of the two former Justice Department attorneys who should face such discipline, according to an internal Justice Department inquiry, the New York Times is reporting.
The critical report - still in draft form - concludes that Yoo and other Bush administration lawyers committed “serious lapses of judgment in writing secret memorandums authorizing brutal interrogations,” but that they should not be prosecuted, the Times says. Instead, the state bars should consider disciplinary action.
Yoo, a professor of law at UC Berkeley, has argued the righteousness of his position several times while teaching at Chapman this year. He could not be reached this morning for comment.
Yoo was a main author of a series of highly controversial legal opinions, including one concluding that the Geneva Conventions didn’t apply to terrorism suspects, and others sanctioning the 
use of ”highly coercive interrogation techniques” on them. He also wrote a 2002 memorandum that gave legal backing to the administration’s secret program to eavesdrop on the international communications of Americans and others in the country without federal warrants, the Times reports.
Last June, Yoo testified before a House Judiciary sub-committee that a controversial memo - saying pain had to reach the level produced by “death or organ failure” to be illegal torture - was not a “renegade initiative,” but was reviewed at the White House and by the Attorney General’s offiice.
In a debate at Chapman last month, Yoo said the controversial tactics were appropriate in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks.
“Three thousand of our fellow citizens had been killed in a deliberate attack by a foreign enemy,” he told an audience of several hundred. “That forced us in the government to have to consider measures to gain information using presidential constitutional provisions to protect the country from further attack.”
Yoo got his B.A. at Harvard and his law degree at Yale. He’s a former visiting professor at the University of Chicago and Free University of Amsterdam and held the Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Law at the University of Trento, in Italy. He was a law clerk for Justice Clarence Thomas and D.C. Circuit Judge Laurence Silberman. He served as general counsel for the Senate Judiciary Committee from 1995 to 2006 and was a deputy assistant attorney general for the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel before joining UC Berkeley.
(Photos by JOSHUA SUDOCK, THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER)
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Liberals sure love themselves a witch hunt!
Anyone they disagree with shall be ruined either by prosecution (using judicial system) or smeared. Now they want to take this man’s livelihood away because they disagree with him. But William Ayers the terrorist is an upstanding system and a great teacher.
exactly. the entire state gov’t of CA should be tried, fried for incompetence. this includes state boards.
Most people freak out when a teaspoon of water “goes down the wrong pipe”. Anytime you let me put you head down at a 30 degree angle and pour water into your nose until your sinuses and lungs fill and burn, and you can no longer breathe, I’ll give you a twenty, no fifty, no a hundred bucks. What say you?
Big Brother is alive and well…. Lawyers write objectionable material all the time. If it not illegal, leave him alone. There is nothing in the rules of professional responsibility that I am aware of that was violated here. This is obviously “content based” harassment. If he had wrote memos extolling the virtues of gay marriage, (also a concept that most do not agree with) he would be given an award by the State Bar. They (Obama and his admin. and justice department) want Pres. Bush so badly, they will do anything to get to those around him… Chaney and Rice will be the next targets by the justice department.
If i’m reading correctly, these are just his “legal opinions”, since when do we discipline over opinions? Where is his right to free speech. I don’t understand?
there is no explanation for lawyers, nor liberals. especially in CA.
Yeah! Those darned liberals and their silly objections to torture. Who do they think they are anyway? The Nuremburg trial?
You all have computers, Google waterboarding demonstrations and see what all the hoopla is about…used on 3 very bad people by the way. It looks very uncomfortable and I wouldn’t want it done to me…but, after it was over, I would still have my limbs, my head and my mind which 3000 people that died September 11, 2001 don’t have.
Liberal shmiberal. Yoo is the typical kind of loose cannon that populated the Bush administration, a totalitarian-leaning idealogue who thinks any means justify the end. They should put this guy, along with Cheney, Rove and Rumsfeld, on a slow boat to nowhere.
It’s “end justifies the means.” Get it straight.
And yes: Whether particular “means’ are justified depends on the end sought to be accomplished. Shooting someone is wrong, unless the “end” is to protect innocent life, punish murder, fight a war, etc.
Typical liberal platitude-ridden moral vanity, refusing to think further than an inch under the surface.
Tell me: Do you think Mr. Yoo, as a lawyer, should have skewed his legal conclusions because they weren’t politically correct?
As far as discipline by the state bar, do you believe lawyers should be disbarred when their legal conclusions are later deemed to have been wrong?
I wrote a memo once arguing that the federal False Claims Act dictated a certain result. The U.S. District Court agreed with me. Later, in an unrelated case, the Supreme Court unanimously disagreed with one of my conclusions. Should I, and the judge who agreed with me (and all the lawyers and judges who subsequently relied on the authority laid down in my case, based on my memo) be disbarred because the conventional wisdom now interprets the law in a different way?
You people really are thugs. The rule of law means nothing to you.
The reason the end doesn’t justify the means is because you don’t know how many tens of thousands are willing to strap on an IED or dirty bomb because of your means. LA could become a contaminated wasteland because of your means.
That has got to be the most impenetrable comment I’ve seen in a long time.
People who say “the ends don’t justify the means” say it for the same reason all unreflective people use cliches, namely, to avoid actually thinking.
*Some* ends justify *some* means. Ethics is the study of judging which ends justify which means.
As someone once said, if “the ends don’t justify the means,” then there is no moral difference between a person who shoves an old lady in front of a bus, and a person who shoves an old lady out of the way of the bus. The means in both cases is the same — the shoving of an old lady. It’s the end in question that makes one act wrong and the other right.
We’re all riding that boat right now with the Obama administration…everyone put their life jackets on.
During training we’re tase’d, gassed, waterboarded and more. But having not yet been beheaded, have no complaints. It’s not torture. Wake up.
I think prosecuting this guy over legal memo’s is a far more dangerous act or concept than some suspects getting roughed up.
Ya think? This is just more liberal propaganda…exaggerate and repeat over and over again until people start believing you and stop thinking for themselves…hmmm, sounds cultish to me.
Wow, I had no idea that the White House would use a Community College professor to draft an opinion.
Did they use any one from Goldenwest College or Phoenix University as well?
Those must be your alma maters
It’s being reported that the geniuses who are talking about referring Yoo to the bar for discipline didn’t notice that Pennsylvania — the only state in which he’s admitted — has a four-year limitation for disciplinary references.
Yoo’s last memo in question was written in 2003. Oops.
Another sleeze bag gets away with it. He and Carona would make good cell mates.
The fact that you would even contemplate throwing a man in jail for writing a *legal memo* shows you have absolutely no respect for the rule of law.
What’s the charge, Officer? What is the statute this man should be prosecuted under? A basic principle of criminal justice is that for there to be criminal liability, there must be a statute that clearly prohibits what the defendant has done. This kind of post-facto “he’s a sleazebag — let’s cobble together some rationale for charging him” garbage is totally inconsistent with your pretended dedication to the Constitution.
He wrote a complicit opinion. It was not a “legal” memo as it was not filed in any court of record. If I send you an email writing “Joe Schmo killed your sister” when he in fact did not kill your sister, I am complicit if you kill Joe Schmo. No, I would not get charged with murder, but I could get charged on lesser accounts.
Or to make it more familiar, it is illegal to yell “fire” in a theatre when there really isn’t a fire.
Dude, stick to your day job. A memo written by a lawyer to state a legal opinion is a legal memo. A paper filed in court is called a brief or a pleading. Lawyers write more advisory memos that never see a court than they write actual briefs for filing. Both tasks constitute the practice of law.
Find me a single precedent in the legal history of the English-speaking world, in which a lawyer was prosecuted for rendering an opinion, which he believed to be correct but was later determined to be wrong.
Not that it matters (since the analogy has no serious resemblance to the Yoo memos), but what is the “lesser account” (I think you mean “count”) on which your hypothetical e-mailer could be charged?
This form of ‘waterboarding’ is a method used on 3000+ American servicemen every year during a specialized training course. The news media should inform readers that waterboarding conducted by the Japanese on American POWs during WWII was hugely different - basically flooding the body with water so that punches and kicks delivered to the abdomen would result in severe internal injuries. Historic “waterboarding” frequently resulted in death. Current, US conducted “waterboarding” does not.
Lastly, even scuba training involves moments “the misapprehension of drowning.”
I can understand people suggesting that waterboarding is a form of physical or mental abuse. It certainly is - don’t do it to your children. Tasering is also a form of abuse, as is handcuffing, but these things are permitted under certain circumstances.
Before you get all opinionated and huffy about it, why don’t you try actually reading the Geneva Convention?
Here is a starter: under the War Crimes Act Torture is defined as “an act specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering.” Now, before you say that this is severe, the next section of hte Act states that “Cruel or inhuman treatement” is “an act intended to inflict severe OR serious physical or mental pain or suffering, including serious physical abuse…” So, severe is seemingly MORE than serious…and serious is defined in the Act as “i) a substantial risk of death; ii) extreme physical pain; or iii) a burn or physical disfigurement (other than cuts, abrasions, or bruises.”
But never mind what the international statute actually says, that guy Yoo wrote something that I don’t like so lets’ Guillotine him already.
Robespierre is alive and well.
I’d like to get a liberal’s definition of “torture.” So far, their righteous posturing over it has a flavor of “I know it when I see it.”
Please: Tell us what kinds of things should trigger prosecution for torture. Without a clear rule as to what’s legal and what’s not, there’s no justice to a law.
I’ve writen this before. I’ll give you a hundred bucks to let me waterboard you. I’ll charge a buck to let people watch. I’ll make thousands of dollars. Will you take me up on it?
What? No takers?
Alter’s logic:
Anything that causes sufficient discomfort that the average OC Register blog reader wouldn’t submit to it for a hundred bucks = torture.
The fact that I’d rather not something be done to me, doesn’t make it “torture.” I’d rather not get spanked — but that doesn’t mean parents are torturing their children by spanking them. I would have preferred not to have my old water polo coach discipline me for goofing around in practice by making me stand on the high dive holding a ball at arm’s length for ten minutes (try it sometime — it does *not* feel good at all) — but again, that doesn’t make the old wheat-germ-munching grouch a torturer.
I would rather not be waterboarded. Therefore, I choose to practice another career than “international mass-murdering terrorist.” Bad things happen to people who make that choice. It’s an occupational hazard.
I’ll give Thomas, passthejack and snakeo $100 bucks each to let me waterboard them for 10 minutes. That’s $600 bucks an hour, not a bad billing rate. I’ll film it and put it on YouTube. What say you T,p and s?
Anyone else want to up the ante a little?
The fact is that approximately 15,000-20,000 men and women have been “waterboarded” since Yoo’s memo was written, if not more. It is a training method used on American pilots, special forces, and some other units. It creates a misapprehension of drowning, a feeling similar to that which every person undergoing scuba training will also encounter - so add tens of thousands more to the mix.
Waterboarding by itself is not torture. Much like tasering, threatening with dogs, handcuffing, hog-tieing, and many other forms of conduct are not torture. That said, if it is done “enough” then it probably would become torture, just like the rest of that conduct. Spending half an hour handcuffed doesn’t mean anything. Spend several months with your hands cuffed behind back, and that might be torture. Tasering is nothing (though it might be improperly applied in some instances). Electrocute someone repeatedly in several areas while also administering a beating, might be torture.
Torture is not one thing. That’s why the definition of torture doesn’t say “Torture is waterboarding, electrocution, burning, pulling fingernails, blah blah blah.” It is an entire course of conduct that constitutes torture.
Honestly, if one of those guys was subjected to waterboarding hundreds of times, and each instance had significant impact, that might indeed be torture. Or it might not. The conduct as a whole would have to evaluated to determine whether or not it is torture.
Opponents of a policy attempt to gain adherents by simplifying it. Waterboarding = torture. Well, it’s not true. Just like “Bush Lied - Thousands Died” is not true, and just like “Obama is a Muslim socialist” is not true. All of these simplifications distort and obscure the nuance that represents the actual truth.
I would undergo a waterboarding session, performed by the guys who do SERE training, for $100,000.
By the way, I’m personally familiar with the gag reflex that’s supposed to make waterboarding so awful. I took a bunch of guys on a rafting trip down the Kern River once. The Kern’s water level fluctuates with the seasons, so at high water the river basically flows through the branches of trees along the riverbank. As our raft got sucked under one of these trees, I, without thinking, lifted a branch up and over my head as we passed by. *Twang.* It snapped back, and clobbered everybody in the back of the boat. They weren’t happy, and expressed their displeasure by holding me down in the bottom of the boat and pouring bail buckets over me. I’m plenty used to holding my breath — long hold-downs surfing, etc. — but I found myself, to my utter surprise, fighting a weird kind of panic. Waterboarding has got to be psychologically devastating.
On the other hand, since I read international law as permitting us to kill terrorist captives outright, I find it hard to be too upset about making them freak out.
I would not undergo *real* torture — say, hooking live jumper cables up to my *cough* manhood — for any amount of money.
Ergo, there is “torture” and there is torture. Most Americans have the common sense to recognize this, and so understand that while they stand foursquare against *real* torture, they are willing to countenance inflicting milder forms of physical discomfort, *in extreme cases* — like for the SOB who planned 9/11 and was angling for a repeat.
So you want a strict definition saying what is and is not torture. Why? So that people know how to get around it? Why don’t you think about it first.
Also, figure out what it is you mean by “justice.” I swear, whenever someone uses that word I have no idea what it is they’re actually talking about - probably because they have no idea what it is they mean by it.
Ok, I’ll up the ante. $200 to be waterboarded for 10 minutes, that’s $1,200 per hour, $2.4 million/year. Are you ready snakeo? This could be a new reality show.
BTW, the scuba stress tests are to teach divers to go through a systematic resolution to a problem and to desensitize them to situations that might cause panic. That has nothing to do with putting fear of death in order to break a person’s will.
“So you want a strict definition saying what is and is not torture. Why? So that people know how to get around it?”
Well, yes. I want the law to be clear. I want the people whose responsibility it is to protect the country to know exactly what they can and cannot do.
You, on the other hand, would rather keep the definition of “torture” vague enough that government agents will be in reasonable fear that their judgment as to what is and isn’t torture will be second-guessed by a hostile successor administration — and so they will treat terrorist suspects with kid gloves, avoiding not only actual torture but anything remotely like it. That’s neither fair to the people *you* depend on to protect your sorry hide, nor likely to yield any intelligence information worth mentioning.
If you think it is “justice” to keep the laws vague enough that nobody really knows what is, you are enabling tyranny: When the laws are vague, all that matters is a prosecuting authority’s whim — in which case you’re no longer a country of laws.
Snakeo, are you the same snakeo that’s posted elsewhere here? Because what you just wrote seems completely out of character for the rest. Maybe I’m misunderstanding you, in which case I beg your pardon for the broadside.
No, I don’t think we need a stricter definition of torture. I think the current definition is clear enough and proves some in the prior administration authorized torture.
Just so you know, I am not a Democrat or Republican or Liberal or Conservative. I think Pilosi and Reid should both be voted out of office. I am however an Obama supporter.
“I think the current definition is clear enough…”
What is that definition? In what statute is it found?
(sound of alterego scurrying off to Google)
Pretty soon we won’t be able to get a lawyer to document an opinion, if they feel they can be penalized for doing so. What we’ll end up with is either generic, uneducated legal opinions that can be written by anyone, or opinions that betray interpretation of law and are written towards interpretation of those in power.
I’d love for some of Obama’s lawyers to write opinions that support his causes, then have them reviewed when the next president takes office. By these standards, it’s not the law that dictates the validity of an opinion, it’s the interpreter.
Next thing to happen is that our entire judicial system becomes a two-party organization. If it isn’t already, that is. But this is basically putting us into the carpool lane to tyranny.
Wait until the next administration is elected. Then all those Obama liberals will be investigated and indicted for corruption and for bankrupting the United States. The worm will turn for these leftist liberals like Pelosi, Dodd, Frank, Schumer, Murtha, and others, when they become the investigated and are indicted for their malfeasance to the American people. It is their “watch” and responsibility to protect the U.S. from another successful terrorist attack on the United States.
yoo is an american hero. his and bybee’s memos could very well have saved the lives of you or your loved ones because of their interpretation of the law. waterboarding isn’t torture, people, c’mon. what’s up with all these whiners and criers lately? look at people like john mccain, charles plumb, and the rest of the airmen held captive in vietnam. THEY endured torture and they served this country more than most can even imagine.
bobby: They could also be responsible for the largest anti-American activist movement in history, and the death of hundreds of thousands of people.
wow, now we’re really reaching…the anti-Americans are are in the US and running our country, so you may have something there.
I think the people you’re worried about already have plenty of motivation. 9/11 didn’t strike me as the deed of a gang that was holding anything back.
Your hypothetical “largest anti-American activist movement in history,” if it were willing to kill hundreds of thousands of people because three of their guys got waterboarded, would be the most sick & twisted sunsabuzzards since — well, since Mohammed Atta, Osama B.L. and their merry men. Like I said, anybody that evil is probably already trying his hardest to kill you and me.
Anyway, as long as we’re talking about hypothetical inspirations to anti-American mass murder, why don’t you look in the mirror? Could not your kind’s obsession with painting America in the worst possible light be just as responsible for psychopaths trying to kill us as is pouring water on three guys’ faces?
Thomas: What did you mean by “your kind”? I’m a white caucasian Deist male who believes wholeheartedly in our Constitution. I also believe we should not renege on the promises we make when we sign international treaties. We executed Japanese soldiers for waterboarding. We executed German soldiers for following orders - read up on the Nuremberg Defense.
Are you saying we should switch from waterboarding to executions? If I’m the enemy, I’ll take waterboarding for my “CRIMES” on humanity.
No, I am writing we should still hold ourselves above the fray. We should NOT be torturing on a whim.
Waterboarding “3″ known terrorists who are conspiring to kill thousands of people and destroy our country is not a whim…and also not torture.
alterego55, you’re mixing your message. The Japanese and Germans who were executed killed people. Read up on your history. You should read up on the Nuremburg Trials. Six million dead (not including soldiers) for the final solution. How dare you compare water boarding to Nuremburg. If you’re going to use history as a defense, know your material.
Considering that a grand total of 3 people — all seriously bad dudes — were ever waterboarded, I’d say we’re well clear of “torturing on a whim.”
People far more serious-minded than you gave this a lot of thought, and came to a conclusion that waterboarding Khalid Sheik Mohammed was justified in order to avoid the mass murders he was planning. You, evidently, take the position that it is better for thousands of lives to be lost, than that a man who plans to kill them be waterboarded. You’re entitled to your opinion, but you’re not entitled to make the grave moral dilemma here into a simplistic cartoon.
The Japanese guy I presume you’re referring to (1) inflicted *real* torture (including beatings and cigarette burns) as well as a particularly severe form of waterboarding, (2) on legitimate prisoners of war (who can’t be subjected to *any* coercive interrogation at all).
There is a difference between that, and waterboarding of an unlawful combatant who, under the most reasonable interpretations of international law, isn’t entitled to anything more than summary execution at the point of capture.
What international treaties are you referring to? Yoo wrote a memo discussing which interrogation measures did and did not violate the UN Convention Against Torture. He concluded that some of the proposed techniques violated the Convention, and some did not. Are you seriously arguing that Yoo ought to be executed for trying to apply generalized provisions of a treaty to a specific circumstance?
By “your kind,” I mean the kind of person (1) who thinks in cliches, and tends not to look past them, and (2) whose default setting, when faced with a controversial issue involving the United States, tends to portray the facts in the light most unfavorable to the country.
Whether you recognize it or not, waterboarding stands in a gray area. Most reasonable people would agree that old-school Spanish Inquisition-style torture — the rack, roasting on a slow fire, thumbscrews, etc. — is torture. Most reasonable people would also agree that noogies, wedgies, and Indian burns are not. Waterboarding stands in between those extremes. I believe the case that John Yoo made in his memos — that the particular type of waterboarding practiced on KSM, in which cellophane prevented any water from actually getting up his nose, did not rise to the level of “severe harm” prohibited by the UN Convention Against Torture — is at least plausible. That’s what we’re arguing here — not the morality of waterboarding itself. If Mr. Yoo made a plausible legal argument in good faith, talk of disciplining him for doing what lawyers are *supposed* to do is despicable and undemocratic.
Read our US Constitution. That is what governs my opinions. It is an amazingly smart document with amazingly smart covenents to create a self-healing society. Yet, we have been getting further and further from its tenets because of political maneuvering. The further away we get from its tenets, the more vulnerable our society becomes. History will show our inclination to torture with regard to Muslim extremists will be akin to our internment of legal Japanese citizens during WWII. It was wrong.
BTW, I don’t believe only three.
What provision of the Constitution prohibits waterboarding?
What specific provisions of the Constitution are we moving away from?
(By the way, I agree that we’re getting further and further from the system the Constitution frames. The Commerce Clause has been expanded to the point where it no longer serves as the limitation it was written to serve as. Mr. Obama is shredding the Contracts Clause. The power of judicial review has been turned into a mechanism for redefining the Constitution as whatever liberal orthodoxy at any given moment wants; they don’t even pretend anymore to be actually interpreting the actual text. The Establishment and Free Exercise Clauses have been completely re-engineered. Etc., etc.
How does the Constitution have anything to do with this? At the time it was written people were still publicly flogged.
another tired argument. Japanese “waterboarding” was an entirely different procedure that involved severe physical abuse, massive internal injuries, and a significant incidence of death. Oh yeah, and that fits within the confines of Yoo’s memo - torture is something that causes pain or damage roughly equivalent to organ failure.
Waterboarding as conducted by the United States is not the same. We generally are not trying to maim or kill our own pilots and special operations units. SERE waterboarding generates a gag reflex which is accompanied by a fear of drowning or asphyxiation. Mentally disturbing, but nothing comparable to the crimes committed by those Japanese and Germans that were executed.
Since Polosi and Reid received updated memos on interrogation methods and said nothing until it was convenient, I guess their heads should roll next. These memos are recorded and Polosi says now she didn’t read them or didn’t understand them.
War is not a very nice place if you have been their.
Bob, Pilosi and Reid should be fired and fried. However, I am still an Obama supporter.
Alterego, there is hope for you yet. (Just kidding). I didn’t vote for either candidate for president, but I can respect your vote without going through the kill mode like I see some people do for their party. Personally I didn’t think either candidate was qualified for president, just my opinion. I am tired of seeing people manipulated by parties that turn their back on you after the election. I support people not parties.
Bob, I take your kidding appropriately
Unfortunately, our country is divided by the two party system. It has gained a win/lose mentality instead of a “what’s best for the American people” mentality. I really don’t think it is a “turn their back on you after the election” mentality as you have written. I think it has become a cash cow mentality. In what other job can you serve for four years and get a life-long pension?
Anyone who knows the State Bar knows that it won’t so don’t bother reporting.
Bob, Obama is doing much of what he said he was going to do. That is what is pi$$ing off his detractors even more.
Oh really - running the most open administration in history? Right. Moderate and pragmatic? Pragmatic in that he cultivates the perception that he is moderate and nonpartisan so that he can advance the most liberal and partisan agenda the country has seen.
Energy independence? Not going to happen without nuclear power, which he isn’t backing.
Cultivate relationships with our European friends and allies? Good job so far with the British - it would be a challenge to outperform his faux pas on that front.
Not for big government? Wow, really? There is just too much evidence to the contrary to even begin to describe it here.
He is supportive of the CIA, but then threatens criminal prosecution based on a CIA policy. How do you think their morale is doing?
So no, he is doing some of the things he said he was going to do, doing much more of other things that he never said he was going to do, and also doing some things that he said he wasn’t going to do.
The campaign promises he is fulfilling? Being nice to Iran and Russia. Added bonus with being nice to Cuba and Venezuela too. I dont’ foresee a whole lot of good coming of his foreign policy, but nothing to do but wait and see at this point.
I find it a little hard to take that Obama, having damned Bush pre-election for running $300 billion deficits, now sees nothing wrong with running $600 billion structural deficits as far as the eye can see.
And no fair saying “it’s the recession, which is all Bush’s fault.” Those $600 billion-plus deficits are slated to continue (and increase!) long after the recession is over; in the short term, the deficits are in the *trillions*.
I am not a dubya fan. However, I believe he made what will be a historically proven correct decision with regard to financial support of our financial system. And, Obama moved forward with a similar plan.
Statutes: War Crimes Act of 1996.
18 USC 2441(d) (1)(A) defines Torture under the War Crimes Act.
Severe mental pain or suffering is defined in 18 USC 2340(2) “Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment.”
Serious physical pain or suffering means bodily injury that involves– (i) a substantial risk of death; (ii) extreme physical pain; (iii) a burn or physical disfigurement of a serious nature (other than cuts, abrasions, or bruises); or (iv) significant loss or impairment of the function of a bodily member, organ, or mental faculty.
Notice that some of the language in Yoo’s memo that has been found most abhorrent actually comes almost directly from the statute.
In other words, “hate the game — not the player.”
John Yoo is not a member of the State Bar of California. But because the State Bar is a private corporation (that’s right, it is only given power to regulate by the Legislature and Supreme Court) its actions are dictated by whim and caprice and would not be the appropriate entity to put in charge of remedying any laspse in judgment by Mr. Yoo.
My experience with the State Bar and those who handle the disciplinary functions is that they do a terrible job of deciding when and who to seek discipline against. I am ashamed to have this entity overseeing such an important function in California.