THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
THURSDAY, MARCH 29, 2012
POLITICS
PAGE 7A
Former Bush adviser speaks on 9/11. globalization
VIRAJ AMIN
vamin@kansan.com
Current professor of law at the University of California at Berkley and former head of the Office of Legal Counsel John Yoo was on hand to speak at the Robert J. Dole Institute of Politics Tuesday night.
Yoo, who is also a former adviser to President Bush, spoke on various issues ranging from the War on Terror to globalization.
The program was co-sponsored by the KU School of Law, and Constitutional Law Professor Stephen McAllister was instrumental in bringing Yoo to the University of Kansas. McAllister conducted an interview with Yoo that lasted roughly 40 minutes.
Yoo and McAllister have known each other for several years, and McAllister thought the Lawrence community could benefit from hearing someone who has been a part of controversial decisions explain what he was involved in.
"John Yoo has been in the media a lot, and one thing that I hope for is that people appreciate the humanity of the people who are involved in sometimes controversial decisions," McAllister said.
"We want people to listen to what he was involved in as a lawyer, very difficult circumstances.
challenging issues and get a sense of the person rather than just reading newspaper stories or listen to talking heads characterizing who this person is and what he is doing"
Yoo spoke about being in Washington D.C. during the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and the decisions that followed the attacks. Yoo explained the difficulties of going to war with an enemy that wasn't a state or had territorial boundaries.
Yoo spoke briefly about prisoners of war and their status under the Geneva Convention before switching topics to globalization. While McAllister said the assumption was he would talk about his role in the Justice Department, but this gave Yoo an opportunity to talk about his new book on globalization.
"I knew people would want to hear him speak about the events on 9-11, but he is not a one dimensional guy he can talk about a lot of different topics," McAllister said.
After speaking for 40 minutes, the night ended with a brief question and answer session with Yoo.
Edited by Katie James
John Yoo (right), professor of law at the University of California at Berkeley speaks about his experiences working in Washington D.C., at the time of the Sept.11 attacks at the Dole Institute of Politics Tuesday night. He was a deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel of the U.S. Department of Justice, where he worked on national security and terrorism.
IFSSICA IANASZ/KANSAN
FOOD
Plants close amid 'pink slime' fallout
MCCLATCHY TRIBUNE
LOS ANGELES - When it comes to percentage of income spent on groceries, Americans enjoy the cheapest food supply in the world.
But as activist groups continue to pull back the curtain on the techniques that make this cheap food possible. Americans are raising their eyebrows and voicing their concerns to surprisingly powerful effect.
This week, Beef Products International announced the temporary shutdown of three of its four plants that produce an inexpensive, chemically treated recovered beef product the government calls "lean finely textured beef" but opponents have dubbed "pink slime." While contamination problems had been associated with the product as late as 2009 when the U.S. Department of Agriculture was exempting it from routine safety tests industry experts say new government and company testing protocols have made it a safe and incredibly efficient product for the food industry, which commonly adds it to ground beef.
"It was incredible," said Brianna Cayo Cotter, communications director of Change.org, a website that hosted a petition by Texas mom Bettina Siegel that urged the USDA to stop buying ammonia-treated beef for school lunches. "In 10 days she made the USDA, the meat industry and major retailers all back away from it. Now the demand for pink slime has dropped so dramatically that some of the factories are starting
to shut down."
Not everyone views such popular urisprints as a positive development.
"Something is seriously out of kiler in our communications environment when safe food products and proven technologies can be torpedoed by sensationalist, misleading, yet entertaining social media campaigns," said David B. Schmidt, president and CEO of the International Food Information Council. "We should all take several steps back and remember the critical thinking skills we were taught in school."
A spokesman for the Department of Agriculture, which runs the school lunch program, said that lean finely textured beef is still beef, even though it is separated from fat through heat and centrifuge and then treated with ammonium hydroxide to kill bacteria.
The term "pink slime" came from a 2002 internal email between two USDA scientists who were concerned about its safety at the time and lack of labeling. The emails surfaced when The New York Times, reporting on the safety of ground beef in 2009, obtained them through a Freedom of Information request.
The topic remained dormant until April 2011, when celebrity chef Jamie Oliver made "pink slime" a topic on his "Food Revolution" television show. It appeared again in January when McDonald's acknowledged that it had removed the product from its American outlets, and spiked again early this month when Siegel launched her petition.
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