Thousands Are Drawn To Memphis to Honor King

Members of Beloved Community, a group working to carry out the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s goals, march to the Lorraine Hotel, the site where King was killed. (By Win Mcnamee -- Getty Images)

Standing in the plaza below the Lorraine Motel, looking up at the balcony where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was slain 40 years ago, Paul Woodard was full of conflicting emotions.

"You want to see it, but you don't want to see it. It's chilling," said the 50-year-old sanitation supervisor. "But I had to be here."

Woodard and his wife, Katie, made the trek Friday to the National Civil Rights Museum, located in the Lorraine, along with hundreds of others to remember King's death and honor his legacy four decades after he was assassinated.

Woodard said that, for him, the trip was akin to a journey to Mecca, recalling that King's support of sanitation workers in Memphis made it possible for him to succeed in his own career, hundreds of miles away and decades later.

"He gave me the hope when I started on the back of a garbage truck that I could be in charge of the whole operation," said Woodard, who manages a $2.5 million sanitation system in Brunswick, Ga.

Throughout the day visitors lined up in the rain outside the museum, standing with a clear view of the balcony in front of Room 306, where King was shot. The place is frozen in time -- a 1960s-era motel with blue-green doors and metal railings identical to those seen in black-and-white photos of King's aides standing over his limp body.

Presidential candidates Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) also paid their respects, while Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) praised King while campaigning in Indiana (Story, A4). Many of King's contemporaries, including Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.) and the Rev. Jesse Jackson, were on hand, as were family members of the sanitation workers who invited King to Memphis in 1968 to support their strike.

Wearing a T-shirt imprinted with a photo of striking black sanitation workers, Lula Williams, a 60-year-old grill cook in Memphis, pointed out the figure of her father, Jessie Perry, in the picture. He participated in the strike, which was prompted because blacks were not allowed to change clothes at work after their shifts, were not paid when supervisors sent them home because of bad weather and were forced to work in dangerous conditions.

"When we heard he got shot, we got up, and we prayed that Dr. King would make it," said Williams, noting that her father often talked about King. "[My father] told us to always remember what King did and always remember that he stood up for us. The dream will go on."

Yesterday was the culmination of a week of King-related events and included a memorial march by sanitation workers, a candlelight vigil and a speech by the Rev. C.T. Vivian, a close friend of King's.

The Civil Rights Museum, which has been the center of remembrances of King's life and legacy this week, almost did not come to be. For 14 years after King's death, the motel remained open for business -- a living, decaying reminder of his assassination -- until owner Walter Bailey was forced into foreclosure in 1982. To save the Lorraine, prominent people from Memphis formed a group called the Martin Luther King Memorial Foundation that eventually purchased it.

Amid exhibits that show civil rights marchers, a bust of Mohandas K. Gandhi, and the striking sanitation workers, the museum now seeks to answer the question: Did the movement die in Memphis? Visitors to the museum and dignitaries in town argued that King's legacy lives on but that much work remains.

"Here we are today building on the same issues that Martin struggled for more than 40 years ago: the question of color in America, the question of poverty in America and the question of military might in America," said Conyers, before visiting the museum.

He spoke on the dais with Clinton, whose campaign stopped by the Church of God in Christ's Mason Temple -- where King gave his final speech, "I've Been to the Mountaintop," on April 3, 1968, before he retired to the Lorraine.

Speaking at the Mason Temple, Bishop Charles E. Blake of the Church of God in Christ said, "Much of the oppression that was imposed upon us has been significantly alleviated, but in many cases we as a people have been so wounded and so handicapped that we could not readily walk into those rooms that had been opened to us."

Williams's daughter, LaSandra Cleaves, 39, who brought her 17-year-old son and his friend to the King exhibit, said she worries that young people have forgotten the importance of the civil rights movement and its leaders.

"I think the dream has somewhat died. Looking at where we as a people are with black-on-black crime. And King always preached about education, and the dropout rate in Memphis is extremely high," Cleaves said. "I don't think the youth truly understand what Dr. King was trying to instill in us."

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Permissible Assaults Cited in Graphic Detail

Former Justice Department lawyer John C. Yoo now teaches law at the University of California at Berkeley. (By Karen Ballard For Los Angeles Times)

Thirty pages into a memorandum discussing the legal boundaries of military interrogations in 2003, senior Justice Department lawyer John C. Yoo tackled a question not often asked by American policymakers: Could the president, if he desired, have a prisoner's eyes poked out?

Or, for that matter, could he have "scalding water, corrosive acid or caustic substance" thrown on a prisoner? How about slitting an ear, nose or lip, or disabling a tongue or limb? What about biting?

These assaults are all mentioned in a U.S. law prohibiting maiming, which Yoo parsed as he clarified the legal outer limits of what could be done to terrorism suspects as detained by U.S. authorities. The specific prohibitions, he said, depended on the circumstances or which "body part the statute specifies."

But none of that matters in a time of war, Yoo also said, because federal laws prohibiting assault, maiming and other crimes by military interrogators are trumped by the president's ultimate authority as commander in chief.

The dry discussion of U.S. maiming statutes is just one in a series of graphic, extraordinary passages in Yoo's 81-page memo, which was declassified this past week. No maiming is known to have occurred in U.S. interrogations, and the Justice Department disavowed the document without public notice nine months after it was written.

In the sober language of footnotes, case citations and judicial rulings, the memo explores a wide range of unsavory topics, from the use of mind-altering drugs on captives to the legality of forcing prisoners to squat on their toes in a "frog crouch." It repeats an assertion in another controversial Yoo memo that an interrogation tactic cannot be considered torture unless it would result in "death, organ failure or serious impairment of bodily functions."

Yoo, who is now a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley, also uses footnotes to effectively dismiss the Fourth and Fifth amendments to the Constitution, arguing that protections against unreasonable search and seizure and guarantees of due process either do not apply or are irrelevant in a time of war. He frequently cites his previous legal opinions to bolster his case.

Written opinions by the Office of Legal Counsel have the force of law within the government because its staff is assigned to interpret the meaning of statutory or constitutional language. Yoo's 2003 memo has evoked strong criticism from legal academics, human rights advocates and military-law experts, who say that he was wrong on basic matters of constitutional law and went too far in authorizing harsh and coercive interrogation tactics by the Defense Department.

"Having 81 pages of legal analysis with its footnotes and respectable-sounding language makes the reader lose sight of what this is all about," said Dawn Johnsen, an OLC chief during the Clinton administration who is now a law professor at Indiana University. "He is saying that poking people's eyes out and pouring acid on them is beyond Congress's ability to limit a president. It is an unconscionable document."

Yoo defends the memo as a "near boilerplate" argument in favor of presidential prerogatives, and says its fundamental assertions differ little from those made by previous presidents of both parties. In comments to The Washington Post and other news organizations, Yoo has also criticized the Justice Department for issuing new legal opinions that do not include detailed discussions of specific interrogation tactics, which he views as crucial to defining the boundaries of what is lawful.

"You have to draw the line," Yoo said in an Esquire magazine interview posted online this past week. "What the government is doing is unpleasant. It's the use of violence. I don't disagree with that. But I also think part of the job unfortunately of being a lawyer sometimes is you have to draw those lines. I think I could have written it in a much more -- we could have written it in a much more palatable way, but it would have been vague."

The 2003 memo includes long discussions of the relative illegality of a wide variety of coercive interrogation tactics, including a British technique in which prisoners are forced to stand in a spread-eagle position against a wall and an Israeli technique, called the Shabach, in which a suspect is hooded, strapped to a chair and subjected to powerfully loud music.

Various courts had declared both tactics to be inhumane, but not torture, Yoo noted. This meant that they were illegal under a provision of the Geneva Conventions that the administration said had no relevance to unlawful combatants in its custody.

In another passage, discussing the bounds of Eighth Amendment protections involving confinement conditions, Yoo concluded that "the clothing of a detainee could also be taken away for a period of time without necessarily depriving him of a basic human need." Yoo cited the need to prove "malice or sadism" on the part of an interrogator before he or she could be prosecuted.

The interrogation memo was considered a binding opinion for nine months until December 2003, when OLC chief Jack Goldsmith told the Defense Department to ignore the document's analysis.

In his 2007 book "The Terror Presidency," Goldsmith, who now teaches law at Harvard University, said that some of the memos written by Yoo and his colleagues from 2001 to 2003 were "deeply flawed: sloppily reasoned, overbroad, and incautious in asserting extraordinary constitutional authorities on behalf of the President."

Douglas W. Kmiec, a Pepperdine University law professor who served as constitutional legal counsel for Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, said Yoo can be faulted "for not writing more narrowly." It is often better to "brush in hazy gray" rather than "spray paint in black and white," Kmiec said.

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Andrew Sullivan: Bush Administration Officials Will Be 'Indicted For War Crimes'

About Jason Linkins

Jason Linkins is a Political Reporter at the Huffington Post, covering media and politics. He's based in Washington, DC. Previously, he wrote for HuffPo's Eat The Press, and has also contributed to DCist and Wonkette.

Media coverage of the disclosure of the "torture memo" authored by Bush Justice Department official John C. Yoo has been mostly a deafening silence. But on this morning's Chris Matthews' show, someone finally fired a shot. As we mentioned in this morning's liveblog, credit goes to The Atlantic's Andrew Sullivan, for taking the opportunity to ensure that this matter got out into the televised discourse somehow.

SULLIVAN: The latest revelations on the torture front show the memo from John Yoo...means that Don Rumsfeld, David Addington and John Yoo should not leave the United States any time soon. They will be, at some point, indicted for war crimes.

The moment came during a segment on Matthews' show where the panel is invited to "tell him something he doesn't know," though this might be more accurately termed, "something he doesn't know he should talk about." Matthews is hardly alone. Via Sullivan, we are directed to the blog of Glenn Greenwald:

Here are the number of times, according to NEXIS, that various topics have been mentioned in the media over the past thirty days:

"Yoo and torture" - 102

"Mukasey and 9/11" -- 73

"Yoo and Fourth Amendment" -- 16

"Obama and bowling" -- 1,043

"Obama and Wright" -- More than 3,000 (too many to be counted)

"Obama and patriotism" - 1,607

"Clinton and Lewinsky" -- 1,079

I'd also like to quote Greenwald at length here:

Every day, it becomes more difficult to blame George Bush, Dick Cheney and comrades for their seven years (and counting) of crimes, corruption and destruction of our political values. Think about it this way: if you were a high government official and watched as -- all in a couple of weeks time -- it is revealed, right out in the open, that you suspended the Fourth Amendment, authorized torture, proclaimed yourself empowered to break the law, and sent the nation's top law enforcement officer to lie blatantly about how and why the 9/11 attacks happened so that you could acquire still more unchecked spying power and get rid of lawsuits that would expose what you did, and the political press in this country basically ignored all of that and blathered on about Obama's bowling score and how he eats chocolate, wouldn't you also conclude that you could do anything you want, without limits, and know there will be no consequences? What would be the incentive to stop doing all of that?

He couldn't be more right, I'm afraid.

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