Protesters Want University of California, Berkeley Law Professor Fired

According to the Huffington Post, anti-war activists protested Monday at the University of California, Berkeley to call for the firing of a law professor who co-wrote legal memos that critics say were used to justify the torture of suspected terrorists.

Campus police arrested at least four people who refused to leave the university's law school building.

The protesters said John YooJohn Yoo should be fired, disbarred, and prosecuted for war crimes for his work as a Bush administration attorney from 2001 to 2003, when he helped devise legal theories for waterboarding and other severe interrogation techniques.

Screaming "war criminal," the activists confronted Yoo as he entered a lecture hall on the first day of class at UC Berkeley's Boalt Hall School of Law, where the tenured professor is teaching a civil law course this semester.

Yoo, for the most part, ignored the protesters and waited for police to remove them from the classroom before he started teaching. Afterward, several officers stood outside the lecture hall to prevent demonstrators and journalists from entering.

Protesters also staged a mock arrest of Yoo. Some wore black hoods and orange prisoner suits like the ones seen in infamous photos of Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison, which was shut down in 2006 subsequent to reports of prisoner abuse.

"There is little doubt that John Yoo is a war criminal," said civil rights attorney Dan Siegel, speaking outside Boalt Hall. "John Yoo went to Washington and created the ideological, political, and legal basis for the torture of innocent people."

Yoo, who returned to UC Berkeley subsequent to spending the spring semester at Chapman University School of Law in Orange County, did not immediately respond to requests for a comment on Monday.

Yoo, 42, has defended the controversial interrogation techniques, saying they were necessary to protect the nation from terrorists following the September 11, 2001 attacks.

"To limit the president's constitutional power to protect the nation from foreign threats is simply foolhardy," Yoo wrote in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece a month ago.

He has encountered intense criticism since the interrogation memos were made public in 2004. The Berkeley City Council has passed a measure requesting that the federal government prosecute him for war crimes, and convicted terrorist Jose PadillaJose Padilla has filed a lawsuit alleging that Yoo's legal opinions caused his alleged torture.

Christopher Edley Jr., Berkeley's law school dean, has refused requests to dismiss Yoo, saying the university lacks the resources to investigate his Justice Department work, which involved classified intelligence.

Berkeley law students are divided over Yoo, whose courses are among the law school's most popular.

Liz Jackson, a second-year law student, said the university should decide if he violated UC's faculty code of conduct. "I personally believe he has blood on his hands," said Jackson, 30.

But Nathan Salha, 24, who took one of Yoo's courses a year ago and is enrolled in his class this semester, said he's a good professor. "I don't think it's the university's place to fire him for political opinions," he said.