On January 4, 2008, convicted terrorism conspirator Jose Padilla filed a lawsuit in the US District Court for the Northern District of California against University of California, Berkeley law professor John Yoo, the author of the so-called "torture memos," controversial US government memos arguing that detained enemy combatants could be denied Geneva Conventions protections against torture. The suit alleged that Yoo's memos, written while he was a senior lawyer in the US Justice Department, helped set the Bush administration's treatment of people detained as part of the war on terror. The court denied a motion to dismiss the lawsuit, a decision which has been appealed to the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.


Jose Padilla

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