Harvard's Gitmo Kangaroo Law School-The School for Torturers

Harvard's Gitmo Kangaroo Law School-The School for Torturers
by Prof. Francis Boyle
Global Research
June 16, 2008
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=9359

Boumediene v Bush, 553 U.S. Supreme Court, June 12, 2008

Versus

Harvard's Gitmo Kangaroo Law School--

The School for Torturers

Not surprisingly, the 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-- 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 the late, great
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 Harvard Law School, Louis Sohn shall always be our real
Bemis Professor of International Law and never the False Pretender
to that Throne known as Detlev 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 at great risk to their
freedom:

U.S. Marine Corps Corporal Jeff Paterson, the first U.S. military
resister to President Bush Sr.'s genocidal war against Iraq; 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 Iraq;
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; 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 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. Gitmo will become America's Death Camp.
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 freedom 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:
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; 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; the
Neo-Con Con Law non-entity known as Richard Parker;

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 of Waco
Phil. All those incinerated women and children!

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
tragically 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, war crimes, and racist profiling 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, 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 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.

Francis A. Boyle holds a J.D. Magna Cum Laude (1976) from Harvard
Law School, and an A.M. 1978) and Ph.D. (1983) in Political Science
from Harvard University. He taught for two years as a Teaching
Fellow in the Harvard College, and as also an Associate at Harvard's
Center for International Affairs 1976-78). He practiced tax and
international tax with the Boston law firm of Bingham, Dana & Gould
(1977-78). He joined the Faculty of the University of Illinois
College of Law in 1978, where he currently teaches courses on Public
International Law, International Human Rights, the Constitutional
Law of U.S. Foreign Affairs, and Jurisprudence, having previously
taught courses on Criminal Law, International Organizations, World
Politics and International Law, and Latinos and the Law. He is the
author of eleven books including his latest "Protesting Power:War,
Resistance and Law" (Rowman & Littlefield Inc.:2008) and Breaking
All The Rules: Palestine, Iraq, Iran and the Case for Impeachment"
(Clarity Press: 2008).

He can be reached at: FBOYLE @ LAW.UIUC.EDU

Francis Boyle is a frequent contributor to Global Research.