Aussie comedy team crashes law class led by Bush torture architect John Yoo

An Australian comedy team shows that John Yoo will not be left to teach in peace while Obama determines how to handle Bush's legacy of torture

The architect of the legal strategy used to justify the torture of US prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere has slunk back to the law school at the University of California at Berkeley.

But an Australian comedy team showed earlier this month that he should not expect to work on in peace while the US struggles to exorcise "enhanced interrogation" from the national conscience.

As this video shows, two cast members of ABC television's "The Chaser's War on Everything" took a seat in Yoo's law lecture, presumably posing as auditing students, and confronted him during the question-and-answer portion. Hilarity ensues, and the comics come within minutes of arrest.

The payoff lines:

Yoo: "Any questions about how this works?"
Chaser wearing Abu Ghraib black cloak and hood: "Actually professor, I've got one question. How long can I be required to stand here 'til it counts as torture?"

The gag sounds like a reference to the semantic contortions in the infamous justice department memos that conclude practices like waterboarding, slamming a prisoner against a wall and depriving him of sleep are not torture.

Unfortunately, it's hard to gauge the class's reaction because the background sound is drowned out by the studio audience's laughter.

Yoo may soon have more to worry about then pranksters from down under. The Observer's Paul Harris reported last week that Barack Obama's Attorney General Eric Holder is deciding whether to launch a criminal probe of the Bush justice department's role in the use of torture on terrorism suspects.

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