The Sacrificial Yoo: Accounting for Torture in the OPR Report

When the Justice Department finally released the report of its Office of Professional Responsibility on the “torture memos,” recommending that the initial torture memo’s authors, John Yoo and Jay Bybee, be referred for bar discipline, John Yoo declared victory in op-eds in the Wall Street Journal and Philadelphia Inquirer. The report itself concluded that Yoo and Bybee had acted unethically, and quoted many of Yoo’s successors in office as condemning the memos as, among other things “slovenly,” “riddled with error,” and “insane.” But Yoo claimed victory because Associate Deputy Attorney General David Margolis vetoed its recommendation that he be referred for discipline; he, too, condemned Yoo, but considered it more a matter of poor judgment than unethical behavior. This essay critically reviews the OPR Report and Margolis’s report, and maintains that both the report and Margolis committed two fundamental errors. First, neither considered the ultimate illegality of what the memos authorized – torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of human beings within United States custody and control. They focused merely on method, not end result; but of course, it is the end result that makes what Yoo and Bybee did so unethical. Second, and relatedly, both reports spared Yoo and Bybee’s successors from the analysis afforded to Yoo and Bybee. Yoo and Bybee’s successors were very quick to condemn the initial report, but what is perhaps most damning about the entire story is that these same successors consistently reached the same bottom line as Yoo and Bybee, and authorized the same criminal behavior. In many ways, the actions of Yoo and Bybee’s successors are more deeply disturbing, moreover, as they persisted in giving a green light to the CIA in secret even as the law in public grew ever explicit in underscoring that what they were authorizing was illegal. Moreover, these later memos, written by Jack Goldsmith, Daniel Levin, and Steven Bradbury – all of whom harshly criticized Yoo’s work after the fact – were drafted not in the heat of the moment, but many years after 9/11, after seeing the public condemnation of the initial Yoo-Bybee memo, and after the CIA’s Inspector General had reported that there was no evidence that the CIA’s “enhanced” interrogation tactics were obtaining evidence not obtainable through noncoercive tactics. The OPR and Margolis were unwilling to address the ultimate legal wrong committed by Yoo and Bybee, I argue, precisely doing so would necessarily have implicated too many in the Justice Department (and beyond). Thus, the focus on John Yoo was a convenient ploy to avoid confronting the full extent of systemic illegality perpetrated by a whole series of Justice Department lawyers and high-level officials in the Bush administration, up to and including President Bush himself, over a six-year period

Sentence-final expressions-- rasii and yoo : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Japanese at Massey University

In the Japanese language there is a group of sentence-final expressions, which indicate the speaker's attitude toward the proposition they are maintaining. Included in this group are expressions such as kamosirenai, tigainai, hazu, yoo, mitai, rasii, soo (hearsay) and (si) soo. This thesis is an examination of the functions of the two expressions yoo and rasii. In many cases rasii and yoo are interchangeable in the respect that they work as evidential markers that the speaker makes a judgment based on evidence. However there is a subtle difference between them. The distinction between them is made by the degree of the speaker's perception. Even though the same types of evidence may be used, rasii indicates that a lesser degree of the speaker's perception is involved, whereas yoo indicates that a higher degree of the speaker's perception is involved. A closer investigation of the uses of rasii and yoo, based on Brown and Levinson's politeness theory, is carried out and it is concluded that both rasii and yoo work as politeness strategies. That is, the speaker utilises the function of either rasii or yoo to satisfy the other's feeling and to establish a good rapport between the speaker and the addressee in human interactions, as well as to maintain the speaker's own desire

Laughing at Treaties

This article responds to two articles by Professor John Yoo appearing in the same volume. Professor Yoo maintains that treaties, either categorically or presumptively, have the same status in the United States as in the United Kingdom, where they lack the force of domestic law, and hence are not judicially enforceable, until implemented by statute. This response argues that Yoo\u27s thesis contradicts the text of the Constitution, which declares treaties to be the \u27law of the land.\u27 The response notes, further, that Professor Yoo\u27s reliance on the ratification debates to read the Supremacy Clause\u27s reference to treaties out of the Constitution rests on an undefended and implausible version of originalism which regards as binding a supposed agreement reached by Federalists and Anti-Federalists at certain ratifying conventions to read the Constitution in a way that conflicts with the text. The response goes on to explain that, in any event, Yoo\u27s thesis cannot be squared with longstanding precedent, and that Yoo\u27s claim that his thesis is supported by the Constitution\u27s structural commitments is question-begging and unpersuasive

Telegram from Seok-Hyun Yoo, Advisor to the President of the Korean Democratic Justice Party, to Geraldine Ferraro

Telegram from Seok-Hyun Yoo, advisor to the president of the Korean Democratic Justice Party, to Geraldine Ferraro. Telegram has handwritten notes.https://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/vice_presidential_campaign_correspondence_1984_international/1070/thumbnail.jp

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bots, and How I Learned to Start Worrying About Democracy Instead

This essay reviewing Striking Power, John Yoo and Jeremy Rabkin\u27s new book on the legal and policy implications of autonomous weapons, takes issue with the book’s assumptions and; therefore its conclusions. The essay argues that, because of technological and ethical limitations, discriminate and effective use of autonomous weapons may not serve as an adequate substitute for traditional manpower-based military forces. It further argues that traditional conceptions of international law could prove more durable than Yoo and Rabkin suggest, and finally it concludes by suggesting that a grand strategy relying primarily on technological elites managing autonomous weapons actually threatens to undermine our common democracy and its reliance on mass citizen mobilization

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bots, and How I Learned to Start Worrying About Democracy Instead

This essay reviewing Striking Power, John Yoo and Jeremy Rabkin\u27s new book on the legal and policy implications of autonomous weapons, takes issue with the book’s assumptions and; therefore its conclusions. The essay argues that, because of technological and ethical limitations, discriminate and effective use of autonomous weapons may not serve as an adequate substitute for traditional manpower-based military forces. It further argues that traditional conceptions of international law could prove more durable than Yoo and Rabkin suggest, and finally it concludes by suggesting that a grand strategy relying primarily on technological elites managing autonomous weapons actually threatens to undermine our common democracy and its reliance on mass citizen mobilization

Faithful Translation Applied in Translating Webtoon I Love Yoo

The aim of translation is to transfer meaning from the source language to the target language. There are some methods that can be used in translating the text, one of them is faithful translation. Faithful translation method is a method that reproduces the exact contextual meaning of the original within the limits of the grammatical structures of the target language. This study focuses on analyzing faithful translation methods in the webtoon “I Love Yoo”. The objective of this study is to identify how the faithful translation method is applied in translating webtoon Ï Love Yoo”. The method applied in this study is qualitative descriptive method and the data were taken from the 1st to 10th episode of webtoon “I Love Yoo”. The data collected were analyzed by reading both versions of the webcomic, classified each sentence according to the translation methods and explained why the sentences are included into each translation method. To analyze the data, this study used the theory translation method proposed by Newmark (1988). It is found that 8 translation methods were applied but faithful translation method is most frequently used because the translator translates cultural terms and maintains the degree of grammatical and lexical faithfully to the intentions and the text-realisation of the source language writer.

Katie Jihye Yoo

Duman ChoHakjun YoonUnyoung NaWonjoo LeeNino RotaLibby LarsenHans Ga