John Yoo talk on Lincoln interrupted by protest in Seattle

The annual meeting of the American Political Science Association was briefly interrupted this afternoon when a woman protesting the appearance of Bush administration official John Yoo loudly denounced him from the floor when he began to speak. She continued remonstrating against him for three minutes and fifty-four seconds to the catcalls of the audience, who demanded she "shut-up" and leave. Eventually security escorted her out. She was allowed to leave before the police arrived.

Yoo, a professor of law at Berkeley, has been the subject of protests for authoring memos in the Bush administration in defense of enhanced interrogation techniques denounced by critics as torture.

He was speaking on a panel discussing "The 150th Anniversary of Fort Sumter: Lessons for Presidential Power Today."

Yoo refused to be drawn into a debate with the woman, who charged him with defending torture. She demanded that audience members leave to signal their censure of his memos. None left.

After she was physically forced to leave he proceeded with a shortened version of his talk. He said he didn't want to take up more time than he was allotted in the program.

In his remarks he observed that the Bush administration frequently turned to Lincoln for guidance after 9-11 in dealing with enemy combatants. He said that under time constraints there's often simply no time to conduct in-depth analyses, prompting officials to make do with historical analogies.

He defended Lincoln's expansion of presidential powers and was consistent with the expectations of the founding fathers, who designed the office in such a way that its powers could be expanded in emergencies to deal with the crisis at hand.

Yoo aligned himself with the historians who believe that Lincoln was careful to maintain that the steps he took were constitutional. Asked about President Obama's use of force in Libya, he said he approved of it, though he dismissed the president's claim that the United States had not gone to war with Libya. He said that the War Powers Act was clearly unconstitutional.

The panel Yoo appeared on was sponsored by the Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy. The meeting was held at the Hyatt in Seattle.