From Day 1 of the Spygate saga in September, the controversy over New England’s illicit videotaping practices has centered on the Patriots’ efforts to steal their opponents’ defensive signals. But the tapes delivered via FedEx to NFL headquarters in New York on Thursday morning also include evidence of an effort by New England to steal offensive signals, which would broaden the extent of the team’s surveillance operation.
It would have to broaden it into some other sport, as Pro Football Talk explains:
[T]here’s no such thing as “offensive signals.” At least there aren’t “offensive signals” in the same sense that there are (or, given the coming use of radio receivers for defensive players, were) “defensive signals.” On defense, the coaches signal in the play to the players on the field. On offense, the play is called into the quarterback via the radio in his helmet.
Presumably, the tape created by Walsh shows the hand signals made by offensive coaches to alert the players on the field, and on the sidelines, to the personnel groupings that would be used, such as two running backs, one tight end, and two wideouts, or two tight ends, one running back, and two receivers.
Here’s how one source explained the process to us: “A play ends and the offensive coaching staff yells out on the sideline and simultaneously puts up a hand signal. Let’s say they want ‘regular’ personnel, which is two backs, two receivers and one tight end. The signal would be something like putting one finger in the air. The coach holds it up, but generally so do the players that are running on the field. The whole world sees it.”
And one group of folks who see it are the advance scouts from other teams who are attending the game for the purposes of, among other things, figuring out the number of fingers that are put in the air for each type of offensive grouping. It’s a simple process, and it’s a code that doesn’t require much effort to crack.
That’s in sharp contrast to the signals used by defensive coaches to call in defensive plays, which entails a level of intricacy that would require Rain Man-style abilities to decipher on the fly. [...]
So there’s really nothing to it. And, as others have pointed out, the rule that the Pats broke relates to taping generally, not to the taping of offensive or defensive signals. Thus, the presence of one tape with “offensive signals” doesn’t constitute the kind of new evidence that will land the team or coach Bill Belichick in a fresh vat of boiling water.
We know that plenty of folks who don’t like the Patriots and/or media figures who want to see a compelling story fill the slow months because now and July hope that some previously undisclosed proof of cheating will emerge. If it does, it most likely won’t come from the Walsh tape with the “offensive signals.”
Maybe they are tapes of coaches “flipping the bird”? In any case, I eagerly await the existance of game film to be held up as evidence that the Patriots are stealing their opponents’ uniform designs, or their secret “snap-the-ball-to-start-the-play” signal, or perhaps their super-top-secret plan to put 11 players on the field. Isn’t it time for Pacman Jones to beat up somebody in a strip club already? The vultures are getting stupid.
Oxfam warned yesterday that 1.5 million people could die needlessly in Burma as the first outbreaks of disease were reported in the wake of Cyclone Nargis, and many of the worst-hit areas went an eighth day without aid.
International agencies called on the country’s secretive military junta to allow immediate access to those stranded without food, clean water and medicines. Cholera, typhoid and malaria could take hold within days as lack of food and shelter weakened the resistance of survivors. More than 100,000 people are believed to have died in the 130mph winds and storm surges that hit the country last weekend.
“Supplies will run out unless more aid is allowed into the country,” said Christian Aid’s Burma expert, Ray Hasan. “Partners are telling us that there are outbreaks of disease already. There is no time to lose.” The UN World Food Programme said it had never seen such delays in dealing with a modern humanitarian crisis and described the official response as “unprecedented”.
This isn’t - or shouldn’t be - a partisan political issue. But there is an election going on, and someone is going to be President, and their judgment is going to matter. With that in mind:
After John McCain nailed down the Republican nomination in March, his campaign began wrestling with a sensitive personnel issue: who would manage this summer’s GOP convention in St. Paul, Minn.? The campaign recently tapped Doug Goodyear for the job, a veteran operative and Arizonan who was chosen for his “management experience and expertise,” according to McCain press secretary Jill Hazelbaker. But some allies worry that Goodyear’s selection could fuel perceptions that McCain—who has portrayed himself as a crusader against special interests—is surrounded by lobbyists. Goodyear is CEO of DCI Group, a consulting firm that earned $3 million last year lobbying for ExxonMobil, General Motors and other clients.
Potentially more problematic: the firm was paid $348,000 in 2002 to represent Burma’s military junta, which had been strongly condemned by the State Department for its human-rights record and remains in power today. Justice Department lobbying records show DCI pushed to “begin a dialogue of political reconciliation” with the regime. It also led a PR campaign to burnish the junta’s image, drafting releases praising Burma’s efforts to curb the drug trade and denouncing “falsehoods” by the Bush administration that the regime engaged in rape and other abuses. “It was our only foreign representation, it was for a short tenure, and it was six years ago,” Goodyear told NEWSWEEK, adding the junta’s record in the current cyclone crisis is “reprehensible.”
Mr. Goodyear has resigned. Which is good. For an overview of the Burmese government’s human rights record, see here.
We tend to come down hard on whores, and those who consort with whores, in public life - see Eliot Spitzer for an example of this. There are worse things to be. Yes, it is very seedy to sell what should be freely given. But we all gotta make a living. And if someone has some surplus money, and someone else has some surplus time, who are we to say what sorts of private arrangements they can or can’t make? And it’s not like you don’t laugh a little extra hard at your boss’s jokes - if that guy was as funny as you seem to think he is, he’d be watching him on Letterman every Friday night instead of having him sign your timecard over at the Southeastern Buttfuque Office Supply Company. (You really are a fucking embarrassment sometimes. Your parents agree.) So the guy took some money to tell people that the Burmese regime was not as bad as it is. Political campaigns - all of them - are full of this sort of person. You hire paid liars because nobody with any talent for it will do it for free. Meh.
And if one of the participants in this little menage is less than fully informed in their consent, well, two out of three ain’t bad, you know? If you don’t get down like that then you probably should have said something when we were all arranging it, a few Novembers back. You knew his reputation. So he brought along a few professional “friends” and so you weren’t perhaps as central to his affections as some of his pillowtalk had led you to believe. That’s tough. Put on a Hank Williams record and he’ll tell you all about it. Live and learn.
The problem with whores and whorers (and, as the noted philosopher Ludacris has observed, there’s little real difference between the two) is not that they may have unwisely gone to bed with undesireable person X or Y. Let’s face it, for certain values of X and Y, we’ve all done that. The problem with whores is that they will get in bed with anybody, and anybody who gets in bed with them gets in bed with anybody else who has ever procured their services. And nobody in the overcrowded bed gives a shit about you, only what you can do for them.
Thers continues to press his pitiful case, heedless of the vital body of critical scholarship which demonstrates that he is a stupid buttface. Here we see, exposed, the limits of such pre-poststructuralist (and pre-9/11) historiographical modality. And now the Max Sawicky Blogosphere Revival Dancers will party me home.
Demonstrating the limits of his hidebound and dogmatic approach to the subject, Thers trots out some well-known archival footage of Happy Furry Puppy Story Time Music Hour c. June 2003 C.E., seemingly oblivious - or indifferent - to the mountains of critical scholarship which have taken place in the wake of its discovery. In Thers’ paternalistic view of history, the Left Blogosphere was a mere receiver of the dominant MSM culture - primitive metalhead barbarians exposed to the high culture of the middle Republic, if you will - and their role in this story, as the lesser culture, is simple to absorb and learn to ape the forms of ‘civilization.’ The story of harmless, even noble savages, and their domestication. But the true story, as any serious scholar of the field would know, is considerably more complicated - a story of cultural intercourse flowing both ways, of creativity, of senseless, senseless destruction and uncouthness, and gin gulped from crumpled plastic cups. Consider, as one example, this painstaking reconstruction of a comment thread, recently unearthed by Prof. Lee Siegel from the presumed site of tedbarlow.blogspot.com:
The parallels to the present day could not be more stark.
It was already shaping up to be a difficult year for congressional Republicans. Now, on the cusp of Mother’s Day, comes this: A majority of the House GOP has voted against motherhood.
On Wednesday afternoon, the House had just voted, 412 to 0, to pass H. Res. 1113, “Celebrating the role of mothers in the United States and supporting the goals and ideals of Mother’s Day,” when Rep. Todd Tiahrt (R-Kan.), rose in protest.
“Mr. Speaker, I move to reconsider the vote,” he announced.
Rep. Kathy Castor (D-Fla.), who has two young daughters, moved to table Tiahrt’s request, setting up a revote. This time, 178 Republicans cast their votes against mothers.
It has long been the custom to compare a popular piece of legislation to motherhood and apple pie. Evidently, that is no longer the standard. Worse, Republicans are now confronted with a John Kerry-esque predicament: They actually voted for motherhood before they voted against it.
Republicans, unhappy with the Democratic majority, have been using such procedural tactics as this all week to bring the House to a standstill, but the assault on mothers may have gone too far. House Minority Leader John Boehner, asked yesterday to explain why he and 177 of his colleagues switched their votes, answered: “Oh, we just wanted to make sure that everyone was on record in support of Mother’s Day.”
By voting against it?
WHY OH WHY AM I NOT A CHIEF CAMPAIGN STRATEGIST??? Maybe Heath Shuler could sponsor a bipartisan compromise bill to celebrate Mother’s Day by bombing your mom. I mean ‘liberating’. It might help soften their image.
I wonder if this could ever rise to the level of stripping the Patriots of their titles? At the very least I think the official record book should have a Roger Maris style asterisk.
This is consistent with what the Patriots had admitted they had been doing, consistent with what we already knew,” NFL spokesman Greg Aiello told The Associated Press.
Now, Mr. Willis can afford to be gracious here, still riding high from the Redskins heroic victory last month, when they skillfully avoided drawing a game against the Pats in 2008. After last season’s debacle, there was some controversy about whether FedExField should install an NBA scoreboard or borrow the NYSE Big Board to keep track of the inevitable ass-whooping when the Patriots came to visit. (The expense could be offset by replacing the live stadium announcer with thie following 20-second tape loop: first-and-ten, Redskins … Campbell fumbles … Patriots ball … Brady steps back … Moss is wide open … touchdown! Patriots kick off …) A problem for another year.
John Cole, sadly, cannot bask in the glow of such triumphs, as the Steelers will be returning to Friendly Foxborough, MA for their regularly-scheduled beating. (Beatings which have become so regular that one begins to suspect that the Steelers actually enjoy them - however, until Ben Rothlisberger takes the field in a bondage mask, or Mike Tomlin congratulates Coach Belichick after the game with a submissive thank you, sir, may I have another? these thoughts will remain firmly in the realm of the speculative.) Generous Readers will take the following outburst with that in mind:
[quote]The list of the Walsh tapes indicates that the Patriots taped offensive and defensive coaches in regular-season games against the Miami Dolphins, Buffalo Bills, Cleveland Browns and San Diego Chargers. The team also made video of the Pittsburgh Steelers in the 2002 AFC Championship Game.[/quote]
It is personal now. We lost that game 24-17, and it is not too out of bounds to suggest that the margin of victory, one touchdown, was through cheating.
Bill Belichick- Cheater.
New England Patriots- Cheaters.
They should have their Superbowl stripped from them, as well as the AFC championship, and Belichick should get a lifetime ban.
Previous criticisms have involved trying to explain why, according to the rules of football, this makes no sense. These explanations have failed for a couple of reasons, the first being that nobody knows what the rules of American football are. I’ve been watching and playing football for a quarter century, and still not a game goes by where I don’t say “I literally have no idea what the fuck just happened there.” In the reckless days of my youth, when foreigners would ask me to explain football, I would say “well, you know rugby? It’s like that, except …” followed by 2 hours of discursive prattle, followed by everybody being more confused than when we started. Now I just say: “Two teams try to smash a ball from one end of a field to another. In between each play, there is a short episode of Perry Mason. It’s like bee-bop, daddy: if you have to ask, you’ll never know. Boo-bop-shoo-wop-bop-honk.” What this explanation lacks in explanation it more than makes up for in 1950’s popular culture references and lack of explanation. Dig it.
And really, the less time you spend with the NoFunLeague rulebook, the happier you will be. Mostly, it is concerned with the rules of evidence: who may use videotape to review a play, and under what circumstances; how long such a review may be; what length and color of sock one must be wearing during said review; and so on. The second-longest section is used to define the concept of “dancing” to quantum mechanical precision, followed by the word “BANNED!” written out in letters 50 stories high. (In football, as in bee-bop jazz and TV shows where Raymond Burr plays a lawyer, there is no dancing.) These sections are completely re-written after each season, if not each play. Nobody knows what is going on here, and anybody who pretends to know is lying, including the refs. There are also some appendices, included for completeness, which describe what to do if some kind of ball game breaks out, and these rules have some year-to-year-continuity. But this discussion, like all discussions of American football, has nothing to do with that.
I have digressed. We must now consider the second and most important reason why these explanations (of SpyGate’s inherent retardedness, not of football) have failed: you are speaking to people from another dimension. Something like the Twilight Zone, in many ways, if one were watching the Twilight Zone in a hash bar in the Bizarro World. Start with this real-world fact, undreamed-of by Mr. Cole and Willis: a camera is a device which records visual information for future reference. If you don’t understand me, try this experiment at home:
1. Look at something through a video camera. Let’s make it, for example, a big fat football coach standing in the middle of an 80,000-seat stadium during a nationally televised football game. Notice that you can see an image of that something. Notice also that the camera is recording this image of something. Think hard on the difference between these two things. Remember. It will be important later.
2. Take away the camera. Notice that you can still see Coach Fat Ass in real time. Notice that anything that you could see at that time with the camera, you could see without the camera (perhaps with an appropriately set of lenses), and that any information available to you while taping the coach is available while not taping the coach. However, be aware that you will not be able to see this image later. Because that’s what cameras do.
3. Now, put the camera back on the fat coach, and then move your eye away. Notice that you can’t see what he is doing anymore. But, thanks to the camera, you will be able to review what he is doing later. Not now. Later. In time. Which, in our universe, moves forward.
Now, if one produces a videotape of an event, it is evidence that someone made a record of this event for future, after-the-fact reference. Additionally, in addition to the 80,000 people in the stadium and the tens of millions of people watching on TV, some cameraperson was watching some defensive coach do something with his hands - information which, as it happens, would be useless to anyone in real time, which may be why nobody tries to hide it. But this is far beyond the scope of our current discussion. This is where we are in the real world.
In the Bizarro Bonghit Twilight Zone, however, “cameras” apparently have the magical ability to see things invisible to the eye, instantly decode this information and turn it into a football play, and them transmit them directly into the brains of all coaches and players on a given football team. Evidence that someone used a camera at that game is therefore evidence of gross cheating in that game, and it’s evidence which points to the kinds of cheating that saying “yeah we’ve been doing that for years”, and other Super Bowl-winning coaches saying “yeah, everyone’s been doing that for years” or the NFL sending out a league-wide memo saying “we know you are all doing this, so knock it off, and don’t you even think about dancing,” do not, because, um, because … like … oh, wow … um, cuz … like, whoa … yo, tell Rod Serling to call fuckin’ Dominos, man …
So, to review: in the real world, videotaping a pre-game practice - as was alleged, and alleged and alleged, could be evidence of cheating in a game. (Here, I wait patiently for Gregg Easterbrook to explain how the NFL has destroyed evidence of a second cameraman, perched on a nearby grassy knoll). But there is no such videotape. In a Dimension of Sight and Sound and Acapulco Gold and Shitty Local Football Teams, evidence of shit we already established happened constantly is evidence that you won the last fifty Super Bowls. Putting forth such half-baked theories in this universe, however, appears to be strongly correlated with having Tom Brady whip your team like they were his illegitimate model-spawn. It may be that football is too sophisticated, intellectually and emotionally, for certain fans. Other amusements might be more appropriate.
… “But wait!” you exclaim. “Consider this: what happens when my shitty-ass team plays the Patriots, and we break Tom Brady’s legs and win? You are going to feel pretty foolish then, I wager!” A fine point. But consider this: what happens when your shitty-ass team plays the Patriots, and you break Tom Brady’s legs, and then all the backup quarterbacks spontaneously combust? And then I have to play backup quarterback, except they don’t have any uniform that fits me, so I have to play naked on national TV and everybody in the world is laughing at my misshapen micropenis? And then you come in to quarterback, except they have no uniform for you so you have to wear the Iron Man superarmor and you break all the records in the world and are named SuperBowl MVP despite the fact that it’s still the preseason and then Gisele announces that she really loves you, and she has always really loved you, ever since you first jacked off to her picture all those many years ago? And then I fall in a big pile of poo and you live happily ever after THE END? How foolish will I feel then? Pretty foolish, pretty fucking foolish, all right. Trust me, these twin Swords of Damocles hang heavy above my head, Dear Friends, and certainly inform the circumspect character of this post.
Professor William Drummond
Chair, Academic Senate, Berkeley Division
Stephens Hall
University of California
Dear Professor Drummond:
As we discussed this morning, I write this as a consequence of reading what Boalt Dean Chris Edley calls the “Torture Memo” of Professor John Yoo—which horrified me. I write to ask you to appoint a special committee to examine the matter of Professor John Yoo–the matter that Boalt Hall Dean Chris Edley has named “The Torture Memo and Academic Freedom”—the role played by John Yoo in the Bush administration’s policy of subjecting to torture not high-ranking Al Qaeda members with information about ticking bombs but low-level prisoners irrespective of their guilt or innocence or of any information suggesting their guilt or innocence.
I ask you to appoint to this special committee members of the faculty with expertise in moral philosophy, the role of the university, international relations, human rights, and constitutional law. I ask you to instruct this committee to write of a public report to the Academic Senate no later than this Labor Day, advising the Senate of the pros and cons of actions that the Academic Senate might or might not take in the matter of Professor John Yoo, including but not limited to:
(I) no action, as Professor Yoo’s actions while on leave at the Office of Legal Counsel have been misrepresented in the press and on the internet, and he has been defamed.
(II) no action, as Professor Yoo’s “Torture Memo” and related work while on leave at the Office of Legal Counsel are protected under academic freedom or are otherwise not germane to his status at Berkeley.
(III) a complaint to Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost George Breslauer calling for the censure of Professor Yoo for actions while on leave at the Office of Legal Counsel that amount to one or more of:
(A) a breach of professional legal ethics, with respect to the duty that a lawyer and above all a law school teacher who educates future lawyers owes his clients to inform them truthfully and completely of the state of the law;
(B) work performed for the Office of Legal Counsel sufficiently misleading to rise to the same level in a professional school as work that violates the principles of scholarly integrity reaches elsewhere in the university;
(C) participation in a conspiracy to violate U.S and international law by torturing detainees, detainees whose guilt in the acts of or even association with Al Qaeda was not only not proven but not even likely.
(IV) a complaint to Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost George Breslauer calling for the dismissal of Professor Yoo for actions while on leave at the Office of Legal Counsel that are, et cetera.
If you have not read John Yoo’s recently-released “Torture Memo,” and have not been as horrified and appalled as I am, I strongly urge you to read it in full.
However, after reading the “Torture Memo” I found myself frozen, with no firm or settled judgment as to what appropriate action is in this context. I lack sufficient knowledge of the facts. I lack sufficient expertise on the issues. Thus I want you to appoint a special committee to write a report because I am enough of a liberal and enough of an academic to believe that discussion of these issues will help.
On the one side there are the claims of academic freedom, enunciated most strongly by our own medieval historian Ernst Kantorowicz just before his resignation from the faculty in protest. He said:
There are three professions which are entitled to wear a gown: the judge, the priest, the scholar. This garment stands for its bearer’s maturity of mind, his independence of judgment, and his direct responsibility to his conscience and his god. It signifies the inner sovereignty of those three interrelated professions: they should be the very last to allow themselves to act under duress and yield to pressure. It is a shameful and undignified action, it is an affront and a violation of both human sovereignty and professional dignity that the Regents of this university have dared to bully the bearer of this gown into a situation in which–under the pressure of bewildering economic coercion–he is compelled to give up either his tenure or, together with his freedom of judgment, his human dignity and responsible sovereignty as a scholar…
In Professor Kantorowicz’s view, a Berkeley faculty member should be allowed to state whatever his or her judgment leads him to state–even if it is that the government of the United States should be overthrown by force and violence–and that no pressure or threats of any kind should be applied to discourage him from saying what he or she decides to say.
On the other side there are at least four interrelated considerations.
The first consideration is that Professor Yoo is professor at a professional school, Boalt Hall, and thus must teach and model professional behavior that will be expected of his students as lawyers. Professor Yoo failed in his Torture Memo to make any reference to the Korean War case of Youngstown, an essential part of any good-faith contemporary analysis of the war powers of the executive branch. This failure to analyze and other deficiencies in the memorandum make it, I have been told, a serious breach of professional ethics–misconduct in failing to fulfill his professional duty to provide his clients with a complete and truthful statement of the law. Writing legal arguments that ignore (not find some way to distinguish, but flatly ignore) controlling precedent is misconduct. Students learning to be lawyers need to be protected from coming to believe that it is an acceptable part of lawyering.
The second consideration is that the work product for others outside the university performed by faculty who teach at professional schools plays a role analogous to that of academic research in other branches of the university. I am informed by some that the argumentative omissions and misrepresentations in the Torture Memo and in other work by John Yoo for the Office of Legal Counsel amount to misconduct that rises to a level equivalent to that of falsifying evidence in a scholarly work. As one attorney observed, “while outside legal work isn’t formally scholarship, it has its own ethical obligations.” The absence of relevant Supreme Court precedent from the Torture Memo is a “failure to meet the standards of practice required by the legal profession [that] appears… close enough to a failure to abide by the standards of the scholarly profession that it can be treated as an equivalent level of scholarly misconduct.”
The third consideration is that some claim that Professor Yoo was not just an advisor, informing those whom Boalt Dean Chris Edley calls the “deciders”–George W. Bush, Richard Cheney, George Tenet, and Donald Rumsfeld–his view of what the law was. Professor Yoo was an implementer. The decision had already been made to torture detainees of unknown but probably low value who there was no reason to think had any knowledge of any possible “ticking bomb.” Attorneys at the CIA and the Department of Defense were protesting that this policy of routine torture was illegal: contrary to U.S. and international law and treaty, and exposed them to potential criminal sanctions. Professor Yoo was asked not to provide an opinion but to write a document to override objections to an already settled-upon course of action, making wrongful use of the opinion-issuing power the Attorney General possesses within the executive branch to silence lawyers who had correctly evaluated the legal framework–and so cramdown the torture policy by issuing what was essentially a “get out of jail free” card in the guise of an OLC opinion. This, I am informed by some, may be a crime. I am informed that the standard, under treaties that are the law of the land in the U.S., is that an act of legal advice that materially contributes to the perpetration of acts of torture and cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment is a criminal act if the actors were at minimum reckless as to the consequences of their advice: it is necessary only that the actors have accepted that their conduct could possibly and forseeably lead to the commission of a crime, not that they have known the exact crime that was contemplated and was to be committed.
The fourth consideration is that it is a key part of our society that our lawyers in the common-law tradition have no association with torture–that it is part of their professional identity to know nothing of the rack, the thumbscrew, the strappado, induced hypothermia, and the water torture. So William Blackstone wrote centuries ago. A rack had been set up in the Tower of London by the Duke of Exeter under Henry IV, and had been used by Queen Elizabeth to torture Jesuits, and by King James I to torture conspirators in the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot–a true ticking bomb. But, William Blackstone proudly stated, this rack had always been “an engine of state, and not of law.” Some inform me that John Yoo’s role in making the strappado and the water torture–which Bush administration members of the twenty-first century speak of in euphemisms as “severe interrogation methods,” just as the Elizabethans of the sixteenth century would speak of taking prisoners to embrace “the Duke of Exeter’s daughter”–routine bureaucratic policy is enough of a breach of professional ethics to make him unsuited to teach in a law school.
I cannot evaluate these considerations. The facts are unclear. I have no special expertise in moral philosophy, professional ethics, the role of the university, international relations, human rights, or constitutional law. I am out of my depth. But I do know that these are vitally important issues–and I firmly believe that Berkeley as an institution does itself no good service if it does not publicly address the matter of John Yoo, and does not face us with an extraordinarily sharp conflict between powerful principles.
And so I ask that this matter be referred to a committee that has the proper expertise: a committee that can properly weigh the considerations of moral philosophy, professional ethics, the role of the university, international relations, human rights, and constitutional law, and publicly set out its conclusions and our options. I do this in the classical liberal belief that argument and discussion are good, and will make us see these issues more clearly.
Sincerely yours,
J. Bradford DeLong
They get replies:
William Drummond answers:
Dear Brad,
Although you and I disagree, our talk this morning was a good one. Thank you for your thoughtful memo. Prof. Yoo has agreed to testify before a Senate committee. More details of what he did while on government service are likely to surface at that time.
The actions you urge on the Senate are therefore premature. Nevertheless, nothing I’ve read in the bylaws that convinces me the Senate has any standing in the matter.
If there’s a showing of any illegal act or actionable breach of professional ethics, the campus administration would have the responsibility of filing a complaint.
Creating the panel you recommend to examine Prof. Yoo’s conduct would be defamatory on the face of it. Besides that, there’s the practical problem of finding committee members with the expertise you outline.
Yours,
Bill
I am left with a puzzle: I have little clue as to what counts as an “actionable breach of professional ethics” or as serious scholarly misconduct. Hence I want a fact-finding committee. But it seems that the creation of a committee to find facts is ipso facto defamatory, and so cannot be contemplated unless there is already “showing of any illegal act or actionable breach of professional ethics.” But if there is already a “showing of any illegal act or actionable breach of professional ethics” then there is no need for a fact-finding committee…
Sounds like you need to break out the waterboard.
A matter of little consequence to the average American: whether Prof. Yoo picks up his paycheck from Berkeley or Liberty University, or whatever Home for Temporarily Inconvenienced Wingnuts would happily scoop him up. But probably a matter of consequence to the administration, who - unless they want to rebrand their university as Liberty West Coast Satellite Campus - might not want their most recognizable faculty member having as his primary field of expertise “concocting legal sophistries to undermine the foundational values of western civilization.” Perhaps also of concern to alumni, who might feel less inclined to cut large checks to their alma mater if their Golden Bears sweatshirts started inviting questions about whether they played home games at Abu Ghraib (football fans can be very cruel). The student body might have an interest in this matter, as would, I imagine, faculty and staff at other UC campuses, and even the taxpayers of California, who might wonder if they wanted to be so openly associated with aperson who scuttled around the dark corners of an administration whose human rights record invited comparisons to the Soviet Union - asserting, for example, that the President had the right to crush the testicles of children in order to compel or punish their parents. So it could matter to more people than you might think whether Prof. Yoo gets to practice his craft in decent society, or whether he has to join the other crackpots and undesirables in the shadow reality of wingnut academia, where Jesus rides a dinosaur and the Moonies pick up the tab and the vast liberal fascist secularist conspiracy doesn’t give a fuck what utter bullshit you get up to so long as you stay down in your fucking hole. The thing about the Universe is that it likes to align itself harmoniously. I suspect there’s a way of putting things in order here.
