Doj Sign-on Letter

Dear Attorney General Eric Holder: We, the undersigned students, faculty, and staff of Berkeley Law, write to petition the U.S. Department of Justice to conduct full and thorough investigations into the conduct of all former Bush Administration officials who participated in the drafting of legal memoranda relating to interrogation, detention, and rendition, which purported to authorize the violation of constitutional rights and acts of torture or other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment. In their work for the Bush Administration, government lawyers, including former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, ex-Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith, former Chief of Staff to the Vice President David Addington, former Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee, former General Counsel for the Department of Defense William Haynes, and former Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo, currently Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, engaged in conduct that was immoral, unethical, and very possibly illegal. Under the guise of legal opinions, the authors of the “torture memos” ignored and in some instances distorted relevant international and domestic law under a theory of extreme executive power to advance a policy of torture. According to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), publicly released documents show that: the administration’s lawyers invented a new legal framework…meant to permit barbaric interrogation practices and to insulate interrogators and officials from prosecution for war crimes. Relying on this new legal framework, interrogators subjected prisoners to abuse and even torture. The documents show that the abuse of prisoners was systemic, not limited to Abu Ghraib, and indeed that hundreds of prisoners have died in the custody of the U.S. military and that many others have disappeared into the CIA’s secret detention system. Despite this implication of a serious breach of legal, ethical, and professional standards, the Department of Justice has failed to fully investigate the “torture memo” authors and hold them accountable. The Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) report on its investigation of the authors of the “torture memos” still has not been released after years of delay. As members of the Berkeley Law community and as current and future legal practitioners, we are compelled to speak out against the conduct of government lawyers who authorized illegal acts of torture and the violation of civil and human rights. As a matter of both law and justice, we call for immediate investigations to redress the harms caused to countless victims and to ensure that present and future government officials respect the rule of law. Sincerely,