Institute for Public Accuracy
915 National Press Building,
(202) 347-0020 * http://www.accuracy.org * [email protected]
___________________________________________________
PM Monday, February 9, 2009
Solicitor General Nominee Hired Torture Memo Writer
Harvard Law School Dean Elena Kagan is scheduled to have a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday for the position of solicitor general. She has frequently been mentioned as a possible nominee to fill Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s seat on the Supreme Court.
FRANCIS BOYLE, [email protected]
Professor of law at the
"Kagan is neither fit nor qualified to become solicitor general for the U.S. Department of Justice — the proverbial ‘Tenth Justice’ of the U.S. Supreme Court — and thus become a leading contender to replace the anti-totalitarian but now cancer-stricken Justice Ginsburg."
Boyle is a former chair of the Harvard Law School Fund Campaign for Greater Illinois and a magna cum laude graduate of
For background, see Washington Post: "Memo Lets CIA Take Detainees Out of Iraq: Practice Is Called Serious Breach of Geneva Conventions"
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A57363-2004Oct23?language=print
er
For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167
More Background…
June 10, 2007
Z Magazine
Harvard’s
by Francis A. Boyle
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 originally founded and still operated by
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 (1956) 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 his long-time collaborator Louis B. Sohn, and not with the bean-counter Vagts. For the entire post-World War II generation of international law students at
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 Congress’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 at great risk to their freedom:
1. U. S. Marine Corporal Jeff Paterson, the first
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 genocidal war against
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 illegally 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
6. 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
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 also 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.
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 accomplice from the Bush Jr. administration Professor John Yoo–now desecrating
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,
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, war crimes, and racist profiling for America’s population of 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, war crimes, and racist profiling upon Muslims/Arabs/Asians of Color, which is exactly why they hired the war criminal Goldsmith to teach such criminal practices to their own law students and thus someday turn them into racist 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 first 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
Source: http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=11&ItemID=13036
——————–
Information Clearing House – Breaking News http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article7350.htm
Professor of International Law Says Harvard Hired a "War Criminal"
By Jason Leopold
11/23/04 "ICH" — A Harvard University Law School alumni and professor of international law and human rights has started a campaign to boycott the prestigious university he once attended as a result of Harvard’s hiring of Assistant Attorney General Jack Goldsmith to join its law school faculty.
Goldsmith was identified earlier this year as one of several legal experts who drafted memos for the White House and the Justice Department saying the military could skirt the rules of the Geneva Convention when interrogating Iraqi prisoners. Legal experts have said that word about bypassing the Geneva Convention trickled down the military chain of command and lead to widespread abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib.
Francis Boyle, who teaches at the University Of Illinois College Of Law and graduated magna cum laude from Harvard in 1971, said he was informed by colleagues last spring that Harvard was considering hiring Goldsmith and that he immediately voiced his concerns to Harvard officials.
"These (Harvard) professors think they are above the law," Boyle said in an interview. "They refused to tell me why they were hiring Goldsmith, who, many of us in the legal profession believe is a war criminal."
Neither Goldsmith nor Harvard law school officials would return numerous calls for comment.
Boyle, according to his bio, has written extensively on international law and politics. He has published eight books. His book, Defending Civil Resistance Under International Law, has been used successfully in numerous foreign policy protest trials.
Boyle is also the lead counsel for
Goldsmith’s March 19, 2004 memo, written for then White House counsel Alberto Gonzales, who was tapped a couple of weeks ago to replace John Ashcroft as Attorney General, caused a furor in legal circles because it authorized the Central Intelligence Agency to transfer detainees out of Iraq for interrogation – a practice that international legal specialists say contravenes the Geneva Conventions, according to an Oct. 24 report in the Washington Post.
"One intelligence official familiar with the operation said the CIA has used the March draft memo as legal support for secretly transporting as many as a dozen detainees out of
Moreover, Goldsmith personally presented Gonzales, the White House counsel, with a "series of arguments that they claimed could be marshaled as defenses against U.S. torture statutes and the United Nations Convention Against Torture (CAT), which has been ratified by the United States," reported Inter Press Service last month.
The full extent to which Goldsmith advised the White House to ignore the Geneva Convention may be revealed during Gonzales’s Senate confirmation hearing in January.
Boyle, a former teaching fellow at Harvard and a former associate at its Center for International Affairs, became so incensed with his alma mater’s hiring of Goldsmith in June that he immediately launched an email campaign to boycott Harvard and said he plans to ask other alumni to withhold funds from the University, which is in the midst of a $400 million fundraising campaign.
"The Harvard Law School Faculty knew full well the nefarious activities that Goldsmith had performed at the Department of Justice and the Pentagon before they voted to hire him. Obviously, the Harvard Law School Faculty wanted a war criminal to join their ranks. For this reason, the Harvard Law School Faculty is not fit to educate students. I would strongly recommend that you discourage students from attending the
Boyle said he is asking colleagues and other alumni to "ding" Harvard law school in the national rankings and "drive their rankings down overall and by each specialty."
"We need to drive home to the Harvard Law School Faculty that this behavior is completely unacceptable to their colleagues in the legal teaching profession," Boyle said. "The Harvard Law School Faculty is not above the Law. Therefore, I recommend that we respond to each and every peer survey we get and rank the
It’s unknown whether Boyle’s actions have had a material impact on Harvard.
ZNetwork is funded solely through the generosity of its readers.
Donate