Francis A. Boyle
Law Building
504 E. Pennsylvania Ave.
Champaign, IL 61820 USA
217-333-7954 (Voice)
217-244-1478 (Fax)
(personal comments only)
 
 

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From: aalsmin-l-boun...@lists.ubalt.edu
[mailto:aalsmin-l-bounces at lists.ubalt.edu] On Behalf Of Boyle, Francis
Sent: Wednesday, April 18, 2007 10:41 AM
To: AALSMIN-L at lists.ubalt.edu
Subject: [AALSMIN-L] Harvard Kangaroo Law School.doc


 
________________________________


Harvard's Kangaroo Law School:

The School for Torturers

By

Professor Francis A. Boyle

18 April 2007

 

            Not surprisingly, the newly released January 2007 issue of
the American Journal of Imperial Law--otherwise known as the self-styled
American Journal of International Law but founded and still operated by
U. S. State and War Departments' apparatchiks and their professorial
fellow-travelers--just published an article by Harvard Law School's
recently retired Bemis Professor of International Law Detlev Vagts (who
only taught me the required course on Legal Accounting) arguing in favor
of the Pentagon's Kangaroo Courts System on Guantanamo despite the fact
that they have been soundly condemned by every human rights organization
and every human rights official and leader in the entire world as well
as by the United States Supreme Court itself in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld
(2006). I am not going to bother to recite here all the grievous
deficiencies of the Gitmo Kangaroo Courts under International Law and
U.S. Constitutional Law. But suffice it to say that the Gitmo Kangaroo
Courts constitute war crimes under the Laws of War, the Four Geneva
Conventions of 1949, and even the U. S. Army's own Field Manual 27-10,
The Law of Land Warfare (1956).  Field Manual 27-10 was drafted for the
Pentagon by my Laws of War teacher Richard R. Baxter, who was generally
recognized as the world's leading expert on that subject, which is
precisely why I voluntarily chose to study International Law with him
and not with the bean-counter Vagts.  

            Since those student days I have personally appeared pro bono
publico in five U.S. military courts-martial proceedings involving
warfare that were organized in accordance with the Pentagon's Uniform
Code of Military Justice (U.C.M.J.)--which still does not apply to the
Gitmo Kangaroo Courts despite the ruling by the U. S. Supreme Court in
Hamdan that the U.C.M.J. should be applied in Guantanamo--on behalf of
five U. S. military personnel who each acted as matters of courage,
integrity, principle, and conscience:

1.      U. S. Marine Corps Lance Corporal Jeff Paterson, the first U. S.
military resister to President Bush Sr.'s war against Iraq; 
2.      Army Captain Doctor Yolanda Huet-Vaughn, the highest ranking U.
S. commissioned officer to be court-martialed for refusing to
participate in President Bush Sr.'s war against Iraq; 
3.      Captain Lawrence Rockwood, who was court-martialed by the U. S.
Army for trying to stop torture in Haiti after the Clinton
administration had invaded that country in 1994; 
4.      Army Staff Sergeant Camilo Mejia, the first U. S. military
resister to be court-martialed for refusing to participate in President
Bush Jr.'s war of aggression against Iraq; and 
5.       Army First Lieutenant Ehren Watada, the first U. S.
commissioned officer to be court-martialed for his refusal to
participate in President Bush Jr.'s war of aggression against Iraq. 

            As I can attest from my direct personal involvement, each
and every one of these five courts-martial under the U.C.M.J. were
Stalinist show-trials produced and directed by the Pentagon that
predictably and readily degenerated into travesties of justice. These
five U.C.M.J. courts-martial involving warfare each proved correct the
old adage attributed to Groucho Marx that military justice is to justice
as military music is to music.  By comparison, the Gitmo Kangaroo Courts
will not even be run in accordance with the U.C.M.J. despite the fact
that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Hamdan that they should be.

            Whenever they are up and running the Gitmo Courts will
constitute Stalinist Show Trials as well as Kangaroo Courts, and their
preliminary proceedings have already proven them to be Travesties of
Justice. Even worse yet, fully-functioning Stalinist Gitmo Kangaroo
Courts will quickly become conveyor-belts of death for alleged and
already tortured terrorist suspects along the lines of the Texas
execution chamber operated by George Bush Jr. when he was the "governor"
of that state and tortured to death 152 victims by means of lethal
injection.  But today under the Four Geneva Conventions of 1949,
executing persons detained as a result of armed conflict without a fair
trial before a regularly constituted court constitutes a grave war
crime.  To be sure, under the First Amendment to the United States
Constitution Professor Vagts has the "right" to advocate war crimes so
long as he does not participate in their commission, or incite them, or
aid and abet them.  But precisely where is that line to be drawn for law
professors?

In this regard, the Harvard Law School Faculty currently has at least
five professors who have advocated torture and war crimes:

1.      Vagts himself, who supported abusing the then recently captured
President of Iraq  Saddam Hussein despite his being publicly
acknowledged to be a Prisoner of War by the Bush Jr. administration
itself and thus absolutely protected by the Third Geneva Convention of
1949 and the Convention against Torture; 
2.      the infamous Alan Dershowitz, a self-incriminated war criminal
in his own right.  Dersh publicly acknowledged being a member of a
Mossad Committee for approving the murder and assassination of
Palestinians, which violates the Geneva Conventions and is thus a grave
war crime; 
3.      the Con Law non-entity known as Richard Parker; 
4.      Another one of my teachers, Waco Phil Heymann.  Previously Waco
Phil had been Deputy to U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno, the Butcheress
of Waco. Reno ordered the Waco Massacre, while Heymann orchestrated its
cover-up and thus earned his well-deserved sobriquet Waco Phil. All
those incinerated women and children!  R.I.P. 
5.      The war criminal Jack Goldsmith who while working as a lawyer
for the Bush Jr. administration at both the Pentagon and later its
Department of In-Justice did much of the legal spade-work designing,
justifying and approving the hideous human rights atrocities that the
Bush Jr. administration has inflicted on everyone after 9/11.  Goldsmith
and his co-felon legal colleague from the Bush Jr. administration
Professor John Yoo--now desecrating Berkeley's Law School where my
friend and colleague the late, great Dean Frank Newman had taught Human
Rights--are functionally analogous to Nazi Law Professor Carl Schmitt,
who justified every hideous atrocity that Hitler and the Nazis inflicted
on anyone. 

Despite my best efforts to prevent it, the Harvard Law School Faculty
and Deans hired the war criminal Goldsmith right out of the Bush Jr.
administration knowing full well that he was up to his eyeballs in the
Gitmo Kangaroo Courts, torture, war crimes, enforced disappearances,
murder, kidnapping, and crimes against humanity, at a minimum.  And when
Goldsmith's proverbial "smoking-gun" Department of In-Justice Memorandum
was published by the Washington Post, Harvard Law School's Dean Elena
Kagan contemptuously boasted in response about how "proud" she was to
have hired this notorious war criminal.  Previously Kagan had also
publicly bragged that the future of International Legal Studies at
Harvard Law School would be in the "good hands" of their resident war
criminal Goldsmith. How true! The Neo-Conservative Harvard Law School
Faculty and Deans deliberately set out to hire this Neo-Nazi legal
architect of the Bush Jr. administration's bogus and nefarious "war
against terrorism" because they fully support it together with all its
essential accouterments of  torture, kangaroo courts, war crimes,
murder, kidnapping, enforced disappearances, crimes against humanity,
and Nuremburg crimes against peace.

 By contrast, after the terrorist bombing of the Murrah Federal Building
by Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols in alleged revenge for the Waco
Massacre and Cover-up by Janet Reno and Waco Phil Heymann, to the best
of my recollection I do not remember that the Neo-Conservative Harvard
Law School Faculty and Deans advocated kangaroo courts, torture, and war
crimes for America's White Judeo-Christian Males.  Yet after 9/11 the
fundamentally White Racist Harvard Law School Faculty and Deans have no
problem with inflicting torture, kangaroo courts, and war crimes upon
Muslims/Arabs/Asians of Color, which is exactly why they hired the war
criminal Goldsmith to teach these criminal practices to their own law
students and thus someday turn them into U. S. governmental war
criminals in their own right.  This is because for the most part the
Harvard Law School Faculty and Deans have always been viscerally bigoted
and racist against Muslims/Arabs/Asians and other People of Color since
at least when I matriculated there in September of 1971.

The Harvard Law School Faculty and Deans are no longer fit to educate
Lawyers, Members of the Bar, and Officers of the Court. They are a sick
joke and a demented fraud.  Groucho Marx would have had a field day with
them: Harvard is to Law School as Torture is to Law.  The Harvard Law
School Faculty and Deans torture the Law.  Do not send your children or
students to Harvard Law School where they will grow up to become racist
war criminals!  Harvard Law School is a Neo-Con cesspool.

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