[DEBATE] : Harvard’s Gitmo Kangaroo Law School — The School for Torturers - Boyle

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Harvard’s Gitmo Kangaroo Law School — The School for Torturers

by Francis A. Boyle / June 17th, 2008

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, Professor of Law, University of Illinois, is author of 
Foundations of World Order, Duke University Press, The Criminality of 
Nuclear Deterrence, and Palestine, Palestinians and International Law, 
by Clarity Press. He can be reached at: FBOYLE at LAW.UIUC.EDU. Read other 
articles by Francis A..

This article was posted on Tuesday, June 17th, 2008 at 7:11 am and is 
filed under Culture, Education, Empire, Human Rights, 
Legal/Constitutional, Terrorism, Torture, War Crimes. Send to a friend.
11 comments on this article so far ...

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1.       Michael Kenny said on June 17th, 2008 at 1:43 pm #

A small lawyer’s aside on the recent US Supreme Court judgment. Since 
the US government argued that the US courts did not have jurisdiction 
because jurisdiction goes with de jure sovereignty and de jure 
sovereignty at Gitmo is vested in Cuba, does that not mean that if the 
Court had accepted the government’s argument, the Cuban courts would 
have had jurisdiction over Gitmo and its detainees and would therefore 
be entitled to order their release on the basis thay they had not 
violated any Cuban laws? The detainees could then have sought, not 
habeas corpus, but enforcement of a foreign judgment, in the US courts 
in accordance with the normal principles of private international law! 
That would have made a complete, worldwide laughing stock of the US 
legal system!

2.       Erik Rose said on June 17th, 2008 at 4:02 pm #

Francis, great article! I become prouder by the day that I graduated 
from Thomas Jefferson SOL, where Marjorie Cohn [author of Cowboy 
Republic, Six Ways the Bush Gang has Defied the Law] still teaches. 
Harvard and Berkeley should be ashamed to have a faculty of felons.

Mr Kenny: Great point and great analysis! GITMO exists for 
jurisdictional reasons only . . it is a jurisdictional black hole by design!

3.       hp said on June 17th, 2008 at 5:17 pm #

And so is the seldom mentioned Camp Bondsteel. in Kosovo(a).
Perhaps even more so.

4.       Bob said on June 18th, 2008 at 5:39 am #

Military justice. In 1965 I was in basic training, and several other 
“trainee duds” and myself were doing a very important job, on our hands 
and knees stripping the black streaks and scuffs off the floor. We would 
clean, some “sir” or other person of importance would simply walk 
through and undo what we had just done. Then, we would be screamed at 
for our inefficiency.

Court martials were in session at the end of the hall, and there was a 
line of people sitting and waiting their turn in front of the board, and 
occassionaly a major would stick his head out of the board and shout, 
“Bring in the next guilty bastard!”

And it turned out they were, in fact, all guilty.

Later, this same major gave us our “training” on the UCMJ, telling us 
that it was even fairer and better than anything you would see in a 
civilian court. And I think he was actually serious.

That mindset is still very much alive, and couple that with the 
statement made by an admiral, that the suicides of certain Guantanamo 
prisoners was actual an act of ‘asymetric warfare’ and you can see what 
it’s really all about.

5.       Lloyd Rowsey said on June 18th, 2008 at 6:53 am #

Thanks for this, Francis Boyle. I was turned down by Harvard Law School 
when I applied in 1963, and came out to Stanford Law from Harvard 
College. My most recent contact with one of our Harvard brothers was at 
my 40th reunion, in the rather eventful year of 2003. My college 
classmate’s name was Bob Gordon, and when I suggested he use his 
influence at Harvard Law in 2003 to start some HLS students doing an 
internet site concerning international law and the Iraq War, he 
demurred. Or maybe he didn’t understand what I was suggesting. anyhow, 
that was then, and now is now.

If I recall, you put up an article at Dissident Voice some months back. 
Keep up the most excellent work. When I took International Law at SLS in 
1965, the prof told us the United Nations was helpful because it 
promoted international dialogs. :-) Hopefully, international law’s time 
is now.

6.       Lloyd Rowsey said on June 18th, 2008 at 4:08 pm #

Bob Gordon was probably at Yale Law School in 2003. (And I guess if I 
didn’t value personal reminisences so highly, I never would have 
commented in the first place.)

And thank you for the personal emails, Francis Boyle, in reply to the 
above post.

7.       Lloyd Rowsey said on June 18th, 2008 at 4:11 pm #

And to pull a triple. My best friend from childhood was in the Judge 
Advocate General’s Corps during Vietnam. And I’ll never forget visiting 
him sometime in the late 60’s, at his home in San Antonio, and him 
telling me that there were so many concrete airbases in South Vietnam, 
“we’re never going to leave.”

8.      Lloyd Rowsey said on June 18th, 2008 at 5:56 pm #

I won’t preface this with “finally” because I almost can’t believe that 
DV readers are so parochial that they don’t understand the import of 
what Professor Boyle has written. No, maybe I’ll just keep posting until 
evening comes, and some of our regulars, at least, rejoin me. How about 
the name of a soldier now prominently displayed at the Iraq Veterans 
Against the War’s website as a war resister: Matthis Chiroux.

Hello?

9.       Lloyd Rowsey said on June 18th, 2008 at 7:01 pm #

Thanks, Michael, for more “Life of the Law.” I truly think, however, 
that Americans just love to judge — a la Judge Judy — and have 
Reality-TV’d themselves into believing they not only can judge 
defendants themselves, they’re the best judges in the world. That should 
have long ago “…made a complete, worldwide laughing stock of the US 
legal system!” (And largely has.) But then, most Americans also think 
the jury-system was created in heaven, and they’re the angels god had in 
mind.

Consequently, it doesn’t matter a twig what the wide world’s opinion of 
American justice is.

10.   Lloyd Rowsey said on June 18th, 2008 at 7:24 pm #

Actually, Michael. I’m astounded the US attorneys argued Cuba was 
sovereign over anything. Isn’t that argument invalid ab initio, since 
the US doesn’t recognize the sovereignty of Cuba? (Leaving aside for the 
moment the question of what or who the United States believes IS 
sovereign over the island.)

Moreover, didn’t or couldn’t the US attorneys argue that the rest of the 
island notwithstanding, Guantanamo was and always has been sovereign 
United States territory?

These are not idle questions to me, a fervid Castro-supporter and 
understander of the fact that laws made by the United Nations are laws 
of the land in America, according to the American Constitution.

Which reminds me of another law school story. Gerald Gunther taught us 
Constitutional Law at Stanford in the sixties, and he was not a big fan 
of Earl Warren. Accordingly, Professor Gunther was very amused when one 
of my co-students remarked that the quotation should not be “Let us 
remember: it is a Constitution we are expounding,” but that it should be 
“Let us remember: it is a Constitution we are expanding.”

11.    Lloyd Rowsey said on June 18th, 2008 at 8:28 pm #

Evidently, Dissident Voices’ readers combined awe about Harvard and 
sympathies with America’s international activites (or is it, mindless 
deference to those activites) means we can put Professor Boyle’s piece 
to sleep for tonite.

But tomorrow! Is another day. In fact it’s Juneteenth, a celebration of 
the abolition of slavery in Texas, celebrated oficially in 26 states 
according to Wikepedia. But I forgot to look…is one of theose 26 states 
the hip and all-African-American-supporting state of California?