Jeff McMillan: I’m wondering if you could talk about what role you see people’s tribunals… playing in the process to moving back towards a more just system that doesn’t have torture.
Mark Danner: People’s tribunals – what do you mean by that?
Jeff McMillan: Where you bring together ordinary citizens… basically a people’s court.
Mark Danner: Yeah. I know they were trying to set one of those up for John Yoo if I’m not mistaken in Berkeley. He lives down the street from me. I sometimes hear the chanting of the wonderful ladies of Code Pink and I did actually debate him a couple of years ago in Boalt Hall. …I’m not quite sure how to answer that. I tend to think that the people’s tribunals should be the courts – you know, the real courts. I don’t mean to denigrate what you are suggesting at all. I just think that the proper place for this is in our institutions. And if it has to be jumpstarted by some kind of extraordinary commission, led by people of public respect who can speak authoritatively about what happened and can be given whatever security clearances are necessary so that no one can say “Sorry – this is classified,” as Dick Cheney does – then I think that that’s the necessary step to take. I came to political consciousness I guess during Watergate and I remember vividly watching those hearings. My mother telling me “Get outside! Stop watching television!” And I remember thinking how glorious this is. It was kind of a sequence that I think I in some way interiorized on how things should work. You know, to me the revelation comes first, where journalists very often reveal some scandal, and second it’s investigation where our institutions, our common institutions of government – courts, Congress, whatever – investigate and come to a common story of what happened. And third you have expiation – you know you have punishment – whether it’s sentencing people or people losing their job or whatever needs to happen to return to a state of grace in some sense or at least to the status quo ante to be more secular about it. And you know this is a situation where that’s been thrown out the window. We’re really stuck between steps one and two – between revelation which has happened and happened and happened. It’s been revealed and revealed and revealed, you know, and more documents will come out and we’ll access the revelation again. But it’s been revealed. But we haven’t gotten to the second step which is an authoritative, common investigation that will tell us the story that the entire society can take as its story of what happened. So I think we need to get there and I wish I could have faith in what you are suggesting, but in fact I guess I just don’t.
2009 Berkeley John Yoo Course Schedule (LAW 7641 Foreign Relations Law, M W 03:00-04:15P, J. Yoo)
