Moral Turpitude at Harvard L-School

According to the Harvard Gazette, University President Drew Gilpin-Faust announced Martha Minow's appointment as dean of the Faculty of Law on June 11th and identified her as "a scholar of remarkable intelligence, imagination, and scope, with a passion for legal education and a deep sense of how the law can serve essential public purposes."

Despite Faust's claim Minow is a shameless Zionist racist, who has casually used her podium as a Harvard Law School professor to spew Zionist propaganda designed to obfuscate the record of the State of Israel as a violator of international humanitarian law and as a perpetrator of crimes against humanity.

In an October 18, 2006 NY Times Op-Ed entitled The Israeli approach to detainee rights, Minow and former IDF legal adviser Gabriella Blum wrote:

Israel enacted its own Unlawful Combatants Law in 2002, with the purpose of providing a domestic legal framework for the prolonged detention of terrorists. Rejecting the terrorists' status as prisoners of war, the law instead provides for holding them "until the end of hostilities." From its inception, it was intended not so much for the detention of Palestinian terrorists, who are either tried as criminals or held in administrative detention, but for others -- mostly from Lebanon or other Arab countries.

Unlike the US bill, the Israeli law provides for a first hearing of the detainee before a high-ranking officer immediately upon his detention; a detainee has a right to legal representation; a first judicial review of the detention warrant has to take place in a district court no longer than 14 days after the first arrest, and every six months thereafter; and the detainee can appeal his detention before a Supreme Court judge. The court must revoke the detention order if it finds that the release of the detainee would not threaten national security or if there are other special reasons that justify it.

Regulations promulgated under the law stipulate conditions for detention. These include provisions on medical treatment, clothing, food (including the right to purchase items in a canteen), outdoor exercises, religious practices, correspondence with the outside world, and even cigarettes. Unlike the US bill, in Israel, the detainee also has a right to meet with representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross. The chief of general staff can permit other visitors, such as family members.

Most of the judicial safeguards and conditions of treatment stipulated under the Israeli law are absent from the American law. Judicial review by courts has been replaced by military commissions; appeal is limited to one court, the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which would be barred from applying international humanitarian law to an appellant detainee's situation. Congress has specified that the president -- not the courts -- is the first and final arbiter on the interpretation of international humanitarian law.

Without some evidence Minow and Blum's claims must receive the same skepticism as Zionist hasbarah (propaganda) asserting that Israel no longer tortures detainees.

On November 8, 2005, after providing the results of outside investigations, David Bloom comes to the following conclusion in the Counterpunch article entitled Setting the Record Straight: McCain, Israel and Torture:

The result [of rubber stamps from Israeli government supervisory organizations] is a total, hermetic, impenetrable and unconditional protection that envelops the GSS [General Security Services] system of torture, and enables it to continue undisturbed, with no supervision of scrutiny to speak of. The achievements of the HCJ [High Court of Justice] ruling of 1999, which was to have put an end to large-scale torture and ill-treatment, limiting it to lone cases of 'ticking bombs,' have worn thin. The 'defense of necessity' has also become no more than a veneer. From the research undertaken by the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel, it is clear that torture is carried out in an orderly and institutional fashion. We know that cases termed 'ticking bombs,' do not involve a lone interrogator improvising "in the face of an unforeseen event," as the High Court stipulated. Interrogators appeal to their superiors in an orderly fashion, receive approval in advance, and employ certain methods repeatedly, at least some of which (including the 'bending' method) require cooperation between a number of interrogators.

The 1999 HCJ ruling constituted a significant and bold step in the right direction, but the HCJ failed in not prohibiting torture and ill-treatment absolutely, and leaving intact the legal - and moral - concept, according to which a GSS interrogator is authorized to consider, albeit in extreme situations 'only', torture as a legal and legitimate ant legal option. The achievements of the ruling are wearing down due to those failures, due to the GSS' policy of torture, and due to the fact that the HCJ, the State Prosecutor's Office, and the Attorney General have, regarding this matter, transformed themselves from guardians and protectors of the law into sentries at the gates of GSS torture chambers.

While there are Harvard Law professors like Alan Dershowitz, who would be more inappropriate as dean, the appointment of Minow entangles the Harvard Law School in the politics of IDF atrocity denial because Minow has propagandized on behalf of the State of Israel for years.

President Faust owes it to the Harvard community and to the world public either to ask Minow to resign or to rescind the appointment.

Other Blog Entries Mentioning Minow

• Another Zionist Racist Serving Obama?
• Zionists Lie About Israeli Torture
• Mondoweiss: Turning 70, Marty Peretz Claims Samantha Power for Israel
• Greg Mankiw's Blog: Larry Summers as Treasury Secretary?
• (Revisionist) Zionists Desiring Arabs

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