Judge: Terrorist can sue over torture memos

Judge: Terrorist can sue over torture memos
First time a government lawyer has been held potentially liable for abuse
SACRAMENTO, Calif.

A convicted terrorist can sue a former Bush administration lawyer for drafting the legal theories that led to his alleged torture, ruled a federal judge who said he was trying to balance a clash between war and the defense of personal freedoms.

The order by U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White of San Francisco is the first time a government lawyer has been held potentially liable for the abuse of detainees.

White refused to dismiss Jose Padilla’s lawsuit against former senior Justice Department official John Yoo on Friday. Yoo wrote memos on interrogation, detention and presidential powers for the department’s Office of Legal Counsel from 2001 to 2003.
Padilla, 38, is serving a 17-year sentence on terror charges. He claims he was tortured while being held nearly four years as a suspected terrorist.

White ruled Padilla may be able to prove that Yoo’s memos “set in motion a series of events that resulted in the deprivation of Padilla’s constitutional rights.”

“Like any other government official, government lawyers are responsible for the foreseeable consequences of their conduct,” wrote White, a Bush appointee.

Yoo did not return telephone and e-mail messages Saturday.
White ruled that Yoo, now a University of California at Berkeley law professor, went beyond the normal role of an attorney when he helped write the Bush administration’s detention and torture policies, then drafted legal opinions to justify those policies.

Yoo’s recently released 2001 memo advised that the military could use “any means necessary” to hold terror suspects. A 2002 memo to then-White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales advised that treatment of suspected terrorists was torture only if it caused pain levels equivalent to “organ failure, impairment of bodily function or even death.” Yoo also advised that the president might have the constitutional power to allow torturing enemy combatants

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Enemy combatant

Padilla is an American citizen who was arrested in Chicago in 2002 and accused of conspiring with al-Qaida to detonate a radioactive “dirty bomb.”

He was held in a Navy brig in Charleston, S.C., for three years and eight months as an enemy combatant. Padilla’s lawsuit alleges Yoo personally approved his time and treatment in the brig.
MIORE HERE ……

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Wild Thing’s comment………
“This lawsuit poses the question addressed by our founding fathers about how to strike the proper balance of fighting a war against terror, at home and abroad, and fighting a war using tactics of terror.”
Wake up, judge, and smell the green tea. The Founding Fathers had no clue about this war on terror conducted by savage animals bent on destroying our whole country. But there IS plenty of stuff and warnings about a president like Obama and how to protect our country from someone like that if SOMEONE would READ our CONSTITUTION!