Comments on: Harvard’s Gitmo Kangaroo Law School — The School for Torturers

By: Lloyd Rowsey

Lloyd Rowsey — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 03:28:52 +0000

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?

By: Lloyd Rowsey

Lloyd Rowsey — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 02:24:48 +0000

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.”

By: Lloyd Rowsey

Lloyd Rowsey — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 02:01:33 +0000

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.

By: Lloyd Rowsey

Lloyd Rowsey — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 00:56:08 +0000

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?

By: Lloyd Rowsey

Lloyd Rowsey — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 23:11:53 +0000

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.”

By: Lloyd Rowsey

Lloyd Rowsey — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 23:08:24 +0000

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.

By: Lloyd Rowsey

Lloyd Rowsey — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 13:53:22 +0000

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.

By: Bob

Bob — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 12:39:54 +0000

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.

By: hp

hp — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 00:17:37 +0000

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

By: Erik Rose

Erik Rose — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 23:02:26 +0000

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!

By: Michael Kenny

Michael Kenny — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 20:43:25 +0000

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!