Protesters call for UCB professor's ouster

BERKELEY, Calif., May 18 (UPI) -- Protesters at the University of California-Berkeley's law school graduation called for the firing of a professor who wrote the U.S. torture policy.

About 50 protesters, clad in orange prison jumpsuits picketed the Saturday event, calling for the ouster of Professor John Yoo, the San Francisco Chronicle reported Sunday.

"We want to see him fired and disbarred for being a war criminal," said Anne Weills, an Oakland lawyer who said she was with the National Lawyers Guild, one of the groups that protested.

Yoo, who is a tenured constitutional law professor at the school, took a leave of absence from 2001 to 2003 to work for the U.S. Justice Department. During that time, he wrote what critics call the "torture memos" that provided the legal basis for the use of torture at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and at the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Yoo is not likely to be fired, law school Dean Christopher Edley Jr. wrote in a memo last month.

"My sense is that the vast majority of legal academics with a view of the matter disagree with substantial portions of Professor Yoo's analyses, including a great many of his colleagues at Berkeley," Edley wrote. "If, however, this strong consensus were enough to fire or sanction someone, then academic freedom would be meaningless."