Demonstrators gathered outside a statewide convention of California Young Republican Federation members on Friday to protest the appearance of John Yoo, the former U.S. Department of Justice official who authored the highly controversial “Torture Memos.” Conservative author Ann Coulter and blogger Andrew Breitbart also participated in the San Francisco event.
While serving the Bush administration, Yoo wrote several legal memos that claimed the president could ignore laws criminalizing the use of torture during times of war. He has been blamed for the use of so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques” in Guantanamo Bay, Iraq and Afghanistan.
He is a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley.
The protest was organized by the group “The World Can’t Wait.”
“We must repudiate the legacy of the past ten years,” the group said in a statement. “If we fail to hold our government accountable for the creation of a national security state that utilizes torture and destruction of civil liberties to silence resistance, we are condoning these crimes.”
