Boalt Hall: teaching the next-gen torture lawyers

I've been reading a lot about the recently released Yoo Torture Memo. Started to write a much longer post on the subject, but as many times will happen with me, I got bogged down in a lot of minutia and ended up with nothing worth reading.

But having seen the usually politically-reticent (blogwise, anyway) Gleemonex pick up the slack with an excellent takedown of the harshly euphemistic BushAdmin mendacity concerning its torture regime, I thought I should at least say something.

Since Bush himself is thoroughly on-record as saying "We Don't Torture", it's not hard to see why he and his minions would want to keep catapulting the "harsh interrogation techniques" propaganda. But what I don't get is why the estupid news media feels it must go along and refuse to call things by their right names. I mean, sure, we can let the government get away with spending trillions of dollars fighting a war of aggression in our name, and torturing any random brown person who we might happen to grab up off the street, but must we, really, let them get away with torturing the English language?

I found one guy in this whole story who won't stand for this. His name is Christopher Edley, Jr., and he's written an opinion piece called "The Torture Memos and Academic Freedom" (emphasis mine). Mr. Edley certainly isn't going to let the BushAdmin get away with euphemizing torture, no sir!

Unfortunately, Mr. Edley happens to be the Dean of Boalt Hall, the University of California at Berkeley School of Law. And his opinion piece was written for the purpose of justifying his school's continued employment of Mr. John Yoo as a professor teaching Constitutional Law.