California, here I come
Right back where I started from [Link]

John Yoo, professor of law at my alma mater, UC Berkeley, became infamous last year for writing a memo justifying torture by the CIA.

As Abhi posted, the NYT just reported that Yoo also wrote a legal opinion claiming Dubya could break U.S. law and let the NSA, a Defense Department agency which intercepts and decrypts overseas sigint, spy domestically on U.S. citizens.

The NSA activities were justified by a classified Justice Department legal opinion authored by John C. Yoo, a former deputy in the Office of Legal Counsel who argued that congressional approval of the war on al Qaeda gave broad authority to the president… That legal argument was similar to another 2002 memo authored primarily by Yoo, which outlined an extremely narrow definition of torture. That opinion, which was signed by another Justice official, was formally disavowed after it was disclosed by the Washington Post. [Link]

On one hand we’ve got Manmohan Singh’s daughter Amrit Singh fighting CIA torture and open-ended detentions in Guantánamo Bay. On the other, we’ve got Professor Yoo on the side of virtually unlimited police powers and Ass’t Attorney General Viet Dinh co-authoring large portions of the Fascist Act.

At first glance, Yoo might seem a political soldier willing to write whatever tissue-thin legal justifications his superiors order. But what if he’s sincere in his belief that torture, locking people up without charge and domestic spying by the NSA is legitimate rather than prima facia illegal and unconstitutional?

Mario Savio

I get the sense that first-gen Asian Americans tend to be socially conservative and more pro-law and order (vs. civil rights and privacy) than the mainstream. It’s the whole idea put forth by GOP recruiters that many first-gen Asian-Americans, including desis, ought to be ‘natural conservatives’ because they tend to hold traditional social views, value family and own small businesses:

Grover Norquist, a Republican anti-tax campaigner with influential friends in the White House, claims that “Indian-Americans are natural Republicans and natural conservatives.” They are on the whole well-educated and well-to-do; they respect family values, and like working for themselves. [Link]

In this case, however, it doesn’t really apply. Yoo was born in Seoul, but he grew up and went to undergrad in the U.S. What’s perhaps most symbolically striking is how involved Asian-Americans are in this administration in crafting key antiterror laws which disproportionately affect minorities. We’ve truly arrived.

Even more ironic, UC Berkeley is best known for its role in the Free Speech Movement. Now one of its most highly-placed professors is working hard to undermine those very same ideals. Mario Savio, meet John Yoo.

Update: The NYT reports Yoo’s conservatism was in fact influenced by his parents’ generation, specifically their revulsion towards North Korea’s communism. It parallels the Reagan conservatism of Cuban-Americans:

By then, Mr. Yoo already thought of himself as solidly conservative. He had grown up with anticommunist parents who left their native South Korea for Philadelphia shortly after Mr. Yoo was born in 1967, and had honed his political views while an undergraduate at Harvard. [Link]

Update 2: (thanks, Siddharth):

Yoo traces his convictions in no small part to his parents, and Ronald Reagan. His father and mother are psychiatrists who grew up in Korea during the Japanese occupation and the Korean War. They emigrated in 1967, when Yoo was 3 months old… Coming of age in an anti-communist household, Yoo said, he associated strong opposition to communist rule with the Republican Party and was himself “attracted to Reagan’s message.” [Link]

Update 3: A review of Yoo’s book in the NY Review of Books.

He was merely a mid-level attorney in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel with little supervisory authority and no power to enforce laws. Yet by all accounts, Yoo had a hand in virtually every major legal decision involving the US response to the attacks of September 11, and at every point, so far as we know, his advice was virtually always the same– the president can do whatever the president wants…

In short, the flexibility Yoo advocates allows the administration to lock up human beings indefinitely without charges or hearings, to subject them to brutally coercive interrogation tactics, to send them to other countries with a record of doing worse, to assassinate persons it describes as the enemy without trial, and to keep the courts from interfering with all such actions. Has such flexibility actually aided the US in dealing with terrorism? In all likelihood, the policies and attitudes Yoo has advanced have made the country less secure. [Link]

Related posts: Hullo. Hullo. Who’s that clicking?, Escape from Draconia, Every little helps, Cabbie hartal in Naya York, Reappeared, Brimful of Amrit, Indian PM’s daughter says Bush personally authorized torture

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