[News] Dean Elena Kagan: Harvard's Gitmo Kangaroo Law School-The School for Torturers

[Anti-Imperialist News]

Dean Elena Kagan: Harvard's Gitmo Kangaroo Law School--The School for Torturers

http://www.zcommunications.org/dean-elena-kagan-harvards-gitmo-kangaroo-law-school-the-school-for-torturers-by-francis-boyle
By <http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/francisboyle>Francis Boyle

Tuesday, May 18, 2010

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 originally founded a 
century ago and still operated by U. S. War and 
State Department legal apparatchiks and their law 
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 Richard R. 
Baxter, who was generally recognized as the 
world's leading expert on that subject. That 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 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, 
conscience and at great risk to their own freedom:

1. U. S. Marine Corporal Jeff Paterson, the first 
U.S. military resister to President Bush Sr.'s genocidal 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 genocidal 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 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 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 U.S. 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. The Marx Brothers are running the Gitmo Kangaroo Courts.

Whenever they are up and fully operating 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 
and/or Gitmo-North in Illinois will become 
Americas first-ever Nazi-style 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 Harvard Law 
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:

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 Neo-Con 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 Butcher of Waco. 
Reno ordered the Waco Massacre, while Heymann 
ordered its cover-up and thus earned his 
well-deserved sobriquet of Waco Phil as an 
Accessory After The Fact. All those incinerated women and children!

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 inflicted on everyone after 
9/11. Goldsmith and his co-felon accomplice and 
co-conspirator 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 and International Law--are functionally 
analogous to Nazi Law Professor Carl Schmitt, who 
justified every hideous atrocity that Hitler and 
the Nazis inflicted on anyone, including the Jews.

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, then 
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 perversely and tragically true! 
The Neo-Conservative Harvard Law School Faculty 
and Deans deliberately hired 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 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 (H.L.S.) 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.

As for Harvard Laws Neo-Con Dean Kagan, Harvard 
Law Graduate President Barack Obama appointed her 
Solicitor General in his Department of Justice as 
the third highest ranking official in that 
department and thus as the proverbial Tenth 
Justice for the 9-Justice U.S. Supreme Court. In 
this capacity Kagan has quarter-backed, 
supervised, and defended in all U.S. federal 
courts the Obama administrations continuation of 
the Bush Jr. administrations hideous atrocities 
perpetrated against human rights, international 
law, civil rights, civil liberties, the U.S. 
Constitution, and Americas Bill of Rights. As 
payback for her yeoman Neo-Con efforts, Kagan is 
now reportedly at the top of a very short list 
for President Obama to nominate to the U.S. 
Supreme Court upon the expected retirement of Mr. 
Justice Stevens, the reputed leader of the Courts neoliberal wing.

Of course Stevens widespread denomination as a 
neoliberal just proves how far to the reactionary 
right the Supreme Court has moved since Stevens 
was recommended for the Supremes to President 
Gerald Ford by the arch-reactionary jurist Edward 
Hirsh Levi, then U.S. Attorney General and 
previously Dean of the arch-reactionary 
University of Chicago Law School where Antonin 
Scalia, Obama, Kagan, and her pet war criminal 
Goldsmith would all teach. As President of the 
entire arch-reactionary University of Chicago 
itself, Levi drove out about 30% of my 
undergraduate class that in 1968 had unwittingly 
entered this Birthplace and Warren for the 
Neo-Con Movement that was founded there by 
Chicago Professor Leo Strauss, a protégé of Nazi 
Law Professor Carl Schmitt. Americas Neo-Cons are Neo-Nazis.

In an interview she recently gave to National 
Public Radio, Obamas Neo-Con Solicitor General 
Kagan went out of her way to proclaim: I love the 
Federalist Society! (Emphasis in the original.) 
The Federalist Society is a gang of lawyers, law 
professors, and judges who for the most part are 
right-wing, racist, bigoted, reactionary, 
elitist, war-mongering, and totalitarian. For 
example, almost all of the Bush Jr. 
administration lawyers responsible for its war 
criminal torture scandal were and still are members of the Federalist Society.

Likewise, five Justices on the current U.S. 
Supreme Court were/are members of the Federalist 
Society: Harvard Law Graduate Roberts; Harvard 
Law Graduate Scalia; Harvard Law Graduate 
Kennedy; Yale Law Graduate Thomas; and Yale Law 
Graduate Alito. Thats what an elite legal 
education will do for you. In any event, H.L.S. 
President Obamas elevation of the H.L.S. Neo-Con 
Kagan to the Supremes would cement the Federalist 
Societys Neo-Con stranglehold over the U.S. 
Supreme Court for the next generation. As for 
another publicly touted Supremes candidate, the 
Neo-Con Cass Sunstein of the University of 
Chicago Law School and Harvard Law School, who is 
currently working at the White House as Obamas 
Disinformation and Infiltration Czar, would be 
just as lethal as Kagan to the American 
Constitution and Republic if sitting on the U.S. 
Supreme Court. Time for the Ordinary People of 
America to get organized against these Neo-Con legal elites!




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