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Comment by skyraider | Hacker News Reader

I hope that the defenders of the legal theories that allow people to be held without trial for many years get their fair share of the blame. Gitmo itself is bad, but the legal theories that let almost anyone be held there without due process are worse.

I understand that it looks bad if people released from custody in Gitmo return to action in 'violent non-state actor' groups. But is looking bad in the media worth human dignity? There's a reason that US citizens have rights like due process (and you can see why everyone should get them, including Gitmo prisoners): If you can't prove it but refuse to let the defendant maintain the freedom that should be associated with presumption of innocence, you get incarceration of the type described in the original posting.

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I hope so, but it doesn't seem to be happening: after John Yoo finished his work at the Bush DoJ, he got a cushy position at Berkeley.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Yoo

Actually, as the wikipedia entry states, he has been on Berkeley's faculty since 1993. His return to Berkeley after being seconded to Bush's DoJ was met with heated resistance and continual protest (e.g. waterboarding enactments outside the law school). As a tenured professor, though, he couldn't be tossed out.

I don't believe this argument of impotence. If they wanted to throw him out, they would have. Tenure is not written down in the constitution.

These 'we want to but we can't' arguments bother me more and more as i grow older. It's usually a pretty transparent excuse for not doing the right thing, by scared old men or ambitious young men.

I suspect you may not know the way tenure works, especially at a public institution.

Tenure doesn't work this way. The whole idea about tenure is to give academics the freedom to pursue things that are controversial to the public - i.e., you can research controversial things without being tossed out by the angry mob. You can afford to go full-bore on your research rather than play politics and PR with the public.

Tossing one tenured professor out is a simple thing. After all like you said, it's not written down in the constitution.

The problem with removing tenure is that it destroys trust in the tenure system. If one professor is stripped of tenure for being controversial, then no one is safe. For this reason the only way to lose tenure is to do something illegal, since that's really the only line you can draw that doesn't move very much.

Tenure is an all or nothing deal. The entire effect of protecting your faculty is completely nullified as soon as you violate your principle for one guy. The floodgates open and suddenly every prof that's doing something controversial becomes a target.

Violating international law against torture is not "controversial", it's criminal.

He will be classified as a criminal when and if the courts convict him as one. Until then what he did is irrelevant to his tenure due to the concerns raised by potatolicious.

So charge him with a crime already and we can get on with this removing-tenure business.

Except you can't - because he didn't violate international nor domestic law. He never waterboarded anyone, nor did he order the waterboarding of anyone.

He worked on legal justifications for the use of torture, which is not an area of international law that's well defined. He didn't make policy nor law, he spun law so that it fit existing policy.

I won't disagree that what he has done is despicable, but what exactly would you charge him with that would actually stick?

I think that's the whole point: professors as a body should fear that if they go off and work to normalize a torture regime, they'll be fired by their universities. Hopefully that encourages them to not do such things. What's certain is that treating such conduct as "controversial" instead of just firing the person is exactly the same kind of DoS attack on tenure as these characters mounted on the legal system -- using the strengths of such systems against themselves.

We haven't invested much energy recently in creating institutions that have adequate defenses against this kind of threat model. Our assumption has been that the socialization structure either produces people who are pathologically criminal or are socially responsible. The emergence of a class of social behavior which is "respectable" and despicable at the same time is a threat we need to deal with.

And the unspeakably repulsive irony is that Woo enjoys these protections while the Gitmo inmates do not receive due process.

I understand that it looks bad if people released from custody in Gitmo return to action in 'violent non-state actor' groups.

Just for the record, if you're a victim of one of these released prisoners, it would be more serious for you than simply bad press.

If that is something that needs to be taken into account, we should all be locked up, just in case we do something wrong in the future. If a prisoner has done something wrong charge and try him, otherwise he is innocent and should be released. If we dismantle that principle, we are in far greater danger from our own than from any external force.

How can you judge? "On the record", even!! Isn't one of the major problems that it's unknown whether these people are even guilty of anything or not? No trial, remember? So how can you suddenly know and decide "for the record" what any one of these prisoners will do if they get out?

Is the man in the article lying then? He says he's innocent. Of course he would. But who are you to decide one or the other?

What do you mean "almost everyone?" The only people in Guantanamo are foreigners. The Supreme Court struck down the other "theories" in a series of cases starting with Hamdi v. Rumsfeld: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamdi_v._Rumsfeld.

Well, Wikipedia estimates the world population at ~7 billion people, and the US population at 315 million. So, "almost everyone" in the world is not an American citizen.

> But is looking bad in the media worth human dignity?

Of course not. But, is you looking bad in the media worth someone else's human dignity? That's a much easier sell.

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