To his shrillest student critics, UC Berkeley law professor John Yoo — a mild-mannered, cherubically baby-faced academic who gravitates toward the driest of legal treatises and the sharpest of suits — incarnates the banality of evil. Yoo has been accused of being a war criminal. Cursed out in public. Escorted by security from a UC Irvine auditorium. Warned by Berkeley police, last spring, that it might not be safe to appear on a law school panel.
"That was pretty wild," acknowledged Yoo, the author of a new book, "The Powers of War and Peace." "That was the most out-of-control thing that ever happened to me."
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And even some of Yoo's fellow conservative intellectuals are disturbed by his contention that President Bush has the constitutional power to unilaterally start a war. Yoo has been in perpetual hot water since the revelation that he helped draft a controversial memo in 2002 — he was a deputy assistant U.S. attorney general at the time — that narrowly defined torture as suffering "equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death."
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Although the Constitution gives Congress the exclusive power to "declare" war, that wording doesn't mean the president needs to consult Congress to "make war" or "commence war," Yoo's book says.
Yoo's critics say this relegates Congress to the role of an ambassador making a courtesy call: Excuse me, in case you hadn't noticed, we're bombing you to smithereens.
http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-et-yoo12dec12,1,367939.story?coll=la-headlines-politics