Larry Thompson: From Rendering Maher Arar to Pushing Pop to Teaching Lawyers
Oh is Mary going to love this.
As she has tirelessly reminded us over the years, Larry Thompson, the former Deputy Attorney General who signed off on Maher Arar’s rendition to Syria to be tortured, has spent the last 7 years at PepsiCo serving as their General Counsel.
But he’s got a new job: as a law professor at University of Georgia.
Now, it appears he’ll just be teaching corporate law and white collar crime and not–like John Yoo at Berkeley–constitutional law.
But it’s yet another example of a top Bush lawyer who, after abusing the rule of law while in government, is being rewarded with a job teaching the next generation of lawyers.
Here’s what the Center for Constitutional Rights had to say about the move (remember they’ve represented Arar):
The Center for Constitutional Rights is profoundly concerned at the news that the University of Georgia School of Law has hired former Deputy Attorney General Larry Thompson as a permanent member of its law school faculty. Mr. Thompson played a prominent role in the extraordinary rendition of our client, Maher Arar, to Syria where he was tortured and detained for a year. Mr. Arar’s case caused international outrage that led the Canadian government to launch a public inquiry, exonerate him of any wrongdoing, acknowledge their role in his treatment, and compensate him. It would be shocking if the Law School were aware of Mr. Thompson’s role in this case and hired him nonetheless. The notion that Mr. Thompson should be held out as a model for future law students when in fact he should be, at a bare minimum, investigated for his role in Mr. Arar’s rendition to torture is astonishing. We call on the Law School to investigate and reconsider its appointment of Mr. Thompson accordingly. Anything short of a full investigation into this matter would bring into question the integrity of The University of Georgia School of Law.