Yoo, of course, is the author of the infamous “torture memos” that justified the abuse and torture of terror suspects held abroad in U.S. custody, and authorized the suspension of the Bill of Rights on U.S. soil.

The Associated Press reports that campus police arrested at least four people who refused to leave the university’s law school building.

Yoo reportedly ignored the demonstrators and. after police removed them from his classroom, began teaching.

Yoo returned to UC Berkeley yesterday after spending the spring semester at Chapman University School of Law in Orange County, where his friend John Eastman is the dean.

According to the AP, Berkeley law students are divided over Yoo: while some think he’s a war criminal who should be fired, his classes are still among the most popular at the law school.

The Department of Justice’s Office of Professional Responsibility is expected to release a report any day now analyzing the conduct of Yoo and his colleagues at the Office of Legal Counsel under the Bush administration, and determining whether he violated ethical rules.  The report has been delayed for months while its subjects and the Department of Justice review and amend its contents.

That the Justice Department sought responses from the subjects of the department’s Office of Professional Responsibility report and is now changing the report as a result has been a source of controversy in the past, particularly from Sens. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.).

They both pressed Holder again today at the Senate Judiciary Committee oversight hearing, asking Holder why it’s taken so long for the report to be finalized and released.

Holder responded:  “My hope is to share as much of that report as I can with members of congress and the public.  There are some potentially classified parts of that report, which we will work to declassify.” Holder promised to release the report “in a matter of weeks. They’re pretty close to the end.”

He added, though, that there will then be a “declassification process” that could further delay the report’s release. “As people look at the work that the OPR has done I’d like them to have the full range of information that OPR considered,” Holder said. “That’s why I think declassification of the report is so important. I wouldn’t want to put an incomplete report in the public.”

At least one picture shows an American soldier apparently raping a female prisoner while another is said to show a male translator raping a male detainee.

Further photographs are said to depict sexual assaults on prisoners with objects including a truncheon, wire and a phosphorescent tube.

Another apparently shows a female prisoner having her clothing forcibly removed to expose her breasts.

These details apparently come from retired Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, who led an inquiry into the abuse at Abu Ghraib and described allegations of rape and abuse in a 2004 report, though he never mentioned these photos at that time. The Telegraph reports that Taguba has now confirmed their existence.

I’ve written before that perhaps Obama’s decision to withhold the photos wasn’t as outrageous as some have suggested, if they just depict the same abuses we already know about. But these revelations suggest that they depict something more — which weighs heavily in favor of their disclosure.

Perhaps the most important reason for Obama to release the photos, as a federal court has already ordered him to, is simply that it will re-focus public attention on the torture, humiliation and abuse of prisoners sanctioned by senior Bush administration officials. They could also renew calls for a criminal investigation not just of “a few bad apples” at Abu Ghraib but of the higher-ups who, given the recently released Office Of Legal Counsel memos that explicitly authorized torture on foreign soil, likely paved the way for the abuse.

In recent weeks, Republicans have managed to shift the focus from the criminal acts of the past administration to, ironically, terrorizing the U.S. population about the possible transfer of alleged al-Qaeda supporters imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay to maximum-security prisons in the United States.

The release of photos depicting the rape of prisoners held by U.S. forces would shift the attention back where it belongs — to the real criminal acts that occurred.

Of course, that may be exactly why Obama, who’s still intent on not “looking backward,” doesn’t want to release them.

–

TWI is on Twitter. Please follow us here.

As Will Bunch at the Philadelphia Daily News puts it:

The Inquirer thus handed Yoo a loud megaphone on what was once a hallowed piece of real estate in American journalism — to write on the very subjects that have now led Justice Department investigators to reportedly recommend disbarment proceedings against Yoo and has led international prosecutors as well as millions of politically engaged Americans to consider the Episcopal Academy graduate worthy of charging with war crimes.

Here’s the Inquirer editorial page editor’s response:

John Yoo has written freelance commentaries for The Inquirer since 2005, however he entered into a contract to write a monthly column in late 2008. I won’t discuss the compensation of anyone who writes for us. Of course, we know more about Mr. Yoo’s actions in the Justice Department now than we did at the time we contracted him. But we did not blindly enter into our agreement. He’s a Philadelphian, and very knowledgeable about the legal subjects he discusses in his commentaries. Our readers have been able to get directly from Mr. Yoo his thoughts on a number of subjects concerning law and the courts, including measures taken by the White House post-9/11. That has promoted further discourse, which is the objective of newspaper commentary.

Uh, maybe. But I tend to agree with Bunch on this:

[W]hile promoting public discourse is a goal of newspaper commentary, it should not be the main objective. The higher calling for an American newspaper should be promoting and maintaining our sometimes fragile democracy, the very thing that Yoo and his band of torture advocates very nearly shredded in a few short years. Quite simply, by handing Yoo a regularly scheduled platform for his viewpoint, the Inquirer is telling its readers that Yoo’s ideas — especially that torture is not a crime against the very essence of America — are acceptable.

I know Cheney isn’t a lawyer, and neither was President George W. Bush, which is maybe why they leaned so heavily and easily on the more bizarre opinions from former Office Of Legal Counsel lawyer John Yoo and his colleagues to justify what Cheney today called “alternative” interrogation tactics — such as vicious beatings, sleep deprivation, simulated drowning, hanging, temperature extremes, food deprivation, threats against prisoners’ families, and blaring rap music 24 hours a day.

But it’s a pretty big omission to forget that when you torture people, you have a really hard time holding them accountable for anything later on. That’s true even if you create your own special court — like the U.S. military commission implemented by the Bush administration.

Remember Mohammed al-Qahtani, the alleged 20th hijacker on Sept. 11?  Susan Crawford, the Pentagon official responsible for charging terror suspects on behalf of the military commissions, had to withdraw the charges against him, even before he faced a military commission, because he’d been tortured — in accordance with Cheney’s policies. His confession was therefore inherently unreliable, Crawford ruled. Apparently, the government had also failed to get any other usable evidence against him.

Crawford is no liberal: she was general counsel for the Army during the Reagan administration and Pentagon inspector general when Dick Cheney was secretary of defense. That’s in addition to being a senior Pentagon official under George W. Bush. But unlike Cheney, she is a lawyer, and she does have some respect for the rule of law.

Cheney and his war council might have thought it wise to throw out those rules in the name of making us all safe from terrorism. But even setting aside the widely known fact that information extracted through torture is unreliable, we’re not going to be very safe when we eventually try bring to trial all those alleged terrorists we’ve been holding, and then have to let them go free because their “confessions” don’t hold up in court. Cheney’s idea that the president could create a “special” court to get around that didn’t work either, as the Supreme Court made clear in it’s Hamdan vs. Rumsfeld ruling that even a military commission has to meet certain minimum standards of fairness.

Only the most tortured logic could allow Cheney to believe that his “alternative” interrogation techniques will ever meet those minimum standards.

Update:  I added a link above to Mark Danner’s remarkable op-ed in Sunday’s New York Times describing the treatment of 14 “high-value” detainees, based on a confidential Red Cross report. For anyone who still finds it hard to believe that the U.S. really tortured prisoners, Danner’s piece is a must-read.

According to Leopold, OPR director H. Marshall Jarrett reached “damning” conclusions about the advice of John Yoo and other lawyers in the Office of Legal Counsel during the Bush administration, which rose to the level of “misconduct.”

“OPR investigators determined that Yoo blurred the lines between an attorney charged with providing independent legal advice to the White House and a policy advocate who was working to advance the administration’s goals,” Leopold writes, based on confidential sources who’ve seen the report.

The OPR report criticizes, for example, Yoo’s reliance on an obscure Medicare reimbursement statute to narrow the definition of torture so much that it would permit waterboarding and other extreme interrogation techniques that have long been considered torture under U.S. law.

To those who have been following the politicization of the Justice Department under former President George W. Bush and the origins of Yoo and other OLC lawyers’ legal memos, none of this will come as a big surprise.  But the fact that a office within the Justice Department reached those conclusions is significant, as it provides one more official piece of evidence that the Bush administration’s defense that it was just relying on the advice of its lawyers when it came to the treatment of detainees, and that the lawyers’ advice shields all those senior officials from prosecution, is disingenuous.

As I’ve explained before, if those legal memos were not reasonable professional opinions, or if they were solicited to justify existing policies rather than to set new ones in accordance with existing law, then Bush officials could see their presumed “golden shield” quickly disintegrate into a heap of worthless straw.

Sens. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) reportedly sent a letter to Jarrett this morning seeking more information about why the report is being kept secret.

Let’s add this OPR report to the growing list of documents that President Obama ought to quickly de-classify under his new Freedom of Information Act policy.

Update: Here’s a key paragraph from the Durbin/Whitehouse letter, which Jason Leopold just sent me:

We agree with Attorney General Eric Holder and CIA Director Leon Panetta that our intelligence professionals should be able to rely in good faith on the Justice Department’s legal advice.  This good faith is undermined when Justice Department attorneys provide legal advice so misguided that it damages America’s image around the world and the Justice Department is forced to repudiate it.  If the officials who provide such advice fail to comply with professional standards, they must be held accountable in order to maintain the faith of the intelligence community and the American people in the Justice Department.

Johnsen, who was deputy assistant attorney general at OLC in the Clinton administration, wrote in an August 2007 UCLA Law Review article that one of the most important roles of the Office of Legal Counsel, which is the primary legal adviser to the executive branch, is to know when to say no to the president.

The “paramount principle that should guide OLC’s work is the imperative to provide accurate and honest legal appraisals, unbiased by policymakers’ preferred outcomes,” she writes in the article, “Faithfully Executing the Laws: Internal Legal Constraints on Executive Power.”

These principles come from a set of ten commandments laid down in December 2004 by Johnsen and 18 other alumni of the Office of Legal Counsel, after learning about (and being appropriately appalled by) the Bybee/Yoo torture memos.

“The Guidelines,” as Johnsen calls them, “come down squarely on the side of accuracy over advocacy, and most of its ten principles follow from and elaborate on the Guidelines’ first and most fundamental principle: OLC should provide an accurate and honest appraisal of applicable law, even if that advice will constrain the administration’s pursuit of desired policies … In short, OLC must be prepared to say no to the President.”

For those looking to the Obama administration for a change in direction, here she is.