West Point Professor Calls Anti-War Legal Scholars Fifth Column Threats

by Stephen Lendman

Lunatics in America aren’t just in Washington. London Guardian national security editor Spencer Ackerman explained West Point Law Professor William Bradford claims “legal scholars critical of the war on terrorism represent a ‘treasonous’ fifth column that should be attacked as enemy combatants.”

He wants them, their home offices, law schools where they teach and media outlets interviewing them targeted like radical Islamists - “even if it means great destruction, innumerable enemy casualties, and civilian collateral damage,” he wrote in an academic paper.

“Shocking and extreme as this option might seem, (dissenting) scholars, and the law schools that employ them, are - at least in theory - targetable so long as attacks are proportional, distinguish noncombatants from combatants, employ nonprohibited weapons, and contribute to the defeat of Islamism,” he claimed.

His National Security Law Journal article headlined “Trahison des Professeurs: The Critical Law of Armed Conflict Academy as an Islamist Fifth Column.”

He calls himself an “associate professor of law, national security and strategy, National Defense University.” Ackerman said an NDU source explained he was never a school employee or professor.

“It appears not to be the first time Bradford misrepresented his credentials,” said Ackerman. “He resigned from Indiana University’s law school in 2005 after his military record showed he had exaggerated his service. (Among his paper’s criticisms of supposedly treasonous lawyers is ‘intellectual dishonesty.)’ “

“The National Security Law Journal’s editor-in-chief has called the article’s publication a ‘mistake’ and an ‘egregious breach of professional decorum.’ “

“We cannot ‘unpublish’ it, of course, but we can and do acknowledge that the article was not presentable for publication when we published it, and that we therefore repudiate it with sincere apologies to our readers,” editor-in-chief, Rick Myers explained

Bradford leaves his targeted academics unnamed - substituting the acronym CLOACA (“critical law of armed conflict academy”) - part of GMAC (“government-media-academic complex”).

Its members include about forty scholars comprising an “aristocracy of senior government officials, elite media members, and university faculty, which squeezes non-members from public colloquy and shapes opinion on security, military and legal issues,” he said.

They “converted the US legal academy into a cohort whose vituperative pronouncements on the illegality of the US resort to force and subsequent conduct in the war against Islamism (represents a) super-weapon that supports Islamist military operations (targeting the) “American political will” to fight.

They’re supported by “compliant journalists (succumbing to) defeatism, instinctive antipathy to war, and empathy for American adversaries.”

Bradford is most concerned about anti-war lawyers. They “tilt the battlefield against US forces (and) contribute to timorousness and lethargy in US military commanders,” he claimed.

They’re among other “useful idiots” who “separate Islam from Islamists by attributing to the former principles in common with the West, including ‘justice and progress’ and ‘the dignity of all human beings.’ “

He urges total US war on “Islamism” (the belief that ‘Islam should guide social and political as well as personal life’) (using) conventional and nuclear force (as well as psyops, either) prepar(ing) to coexist with the West or be utterly eradicated.”

“(T)hreatening Islamic holy sites might create deterrence, discredit Islamism, and falsify the assumption that decadence renders Western restraint inevitable.”

Bradford isn’t alone in his radicalized thinking. America’s war on Islam is longstanding. Post-9/11, Muslims have been America’s enemy of choice - denigrated for their faith and ethnicity, reviled irresponsibly as belligerent, culturally inferior, religiously fanatical, gun-toting terrorists.

Imprisoning them on fabricated charges. Holding them indefinitely under gulag conditions in Guantanamo and other US global black sites.

Pentagon military recruits are indoctrinated to hate Muslims, wrongfully demonized as threats - preparing impressionable youths for combat, sensitizing them to killing, waging phony war on terrorism, advancing America’s imperium - no matter how much mass slaughter and destruction it takes.

Bradford represents systemic sickness - driving a rogue state’s maniacal quest for world dominance at the risk of killing us all.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.

His new book as editor and contributor is titled "Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III."

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

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