october 2004
CENSURE IS NOT ENOUGH
Transcript of an interview with Francis A. Boyle
International Law Professor, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign by Snowshoe Films
http://www.snowshoefilms.com/transcriptcensureisnotenough.html
plus STOPPING A POLICE STATE interview with Prof, Boyle in his office
Author of the forthcoming book, DESTROYING WORLD ORDER
Boyle says: A desperate Karl Rove-guided Bush administration may take the US to WAR AGAINST SYRIA if, by September, they think they will lose the 2004 election.
Boyle says : MoveOn.org's call for CENSURE of George W. Bush is "A MEANINGLESS GESTURE, A COP-OUT, YOU MIGHT AS WELL GO FOR IMPEACHMENT INSTEAD OF > CENSURE."
Other topics include: Laurence Silberman and cover-up; Israeli involvement in Iraq.
Snowshoefilms: What's the significance of Bush's appointment of the notorious neo-con Laurence Silberman (retired federal appeals court judge) to be co-chair of the investigation into the "intelligence failures" over purported WMD in Iraq?
A COVER-UP
Professor Boyle: He's in there to cover the whole thing up. I don't see anything independent coming from all this. The whole purpose, the whole strategy is designed to postpone it until after the election and then they'll deal with it.
Snowshoefilms: Don't you think what it represents, too, is the incredible isolation of the Bush apparatus, picking from a very few select people who are totally compromised or who are part of the team in the first place?
Boyle: They're clearly trying to get away with it if they can, just like they did with the appointment of Kissinger to the September 11 commission and then they blew the whistle on him. I think Silberman was CIA counsel or something like that. He was in the general counsel's office or he was general council. So all this is CIA-type stuff that's going on here. They know exactly what they're doing and they're going to see if they can get away with it. And if they can get away with it, fine. They couldn't on Kissinger. There was a furor. I don't think people know enough about Silberman and the dirty tricks he's been up to.*
VIOLATIONS OF INTERNATIONAL LAW
Snowshoefilms: Under international law, what form of resistance is legitimate, with regard to Iraq?
Boyle: The Iraqi people have a right to use military force to resist US occupation consistent with the laws of war. I mean, they can't target civilians but other than that they can certainly use military force to this illegal, criminal invasion.
Snowshoefilms: Who is monitoring US violations of international law?
Boyle: It doesn't appear to me that they're obeying the Third or the Fourth Geneva Conventions. Everyone in Iraq, if they're military or police and being detained for involvement in armed conflict, they have to be treated in accordance with the Third Geneva Convention. If they are civilians, they have to be treated in accordance with the Fourth Geneva Convention. It doesn't seem to me we're paying any attention to either Convention. We're just picking them up. I guess we're running a big internment facility there, near the airport. Thousands of people just being held and we don't know their condition.
Snowshoefilms: There's no legal counsel for any of these folks?
Boyle: Not that I'm aware of. The International Committee of the Red > Cross (ICRC) is supposed to be taking care of them and supervising it, but 1) they don't say anything and 2), if you check into it, you'll find out that we pay about 40 percent of the ICRC budget, so that's a pretty slim reed to rest on. I don't know but I'm not sure Saddam Hussein's family has retained a lawyer to represent him. I heard Tariq Aziz family had retained a French lawyer, Berget. He's demanded access. But the rest of them, they're just there. The organization that's supposed to look after them is the ICRC. So far, I don't think they've done very much. I can't say I'm overly optimistic that they're going to do much.
ISRAELI INVOLVEMENT IN IRAQ
Snowshoefilms: The methods of the occupation in Iraq seem very close to
those used by the Israeli Defense Forces and the Mossad...
Boyle: We've had marines and others over there [in the Palestinian occupied territories]. That's a matter of public record. We [the U.S.] have been analyzing their tactics against the Palestinians and they've been advising us on it, yeah. You can find that out there in published sources, not just the internet.
And the Israelis - I think it's been reported in the Israeli press - have been over in Iraq, advising us. And we've had our people over there watching what they're doing in Janin and elsewhere. So it looks like the tactics are....they're learning from the Israeli experience, unfortunately.
CALL FOR CENSURE IS A COP-OUT
Snowshoefilms: What about the impeachment proceedings versus censure?
Boyle: Censure by Move On, that's just a copout. They don't have the guts to call for Bush to be impeached. It's a total waste of time. It seems to me they're just getting these people to do a meaningless gesture. If they wanted to accomplish something, Move On would support the impeachment campaign, and they're not doing it. This [censure] is a sideshow. So what? They want something to do, but they don't have the guts to back the impeachment campaign, so the best they could come up with was censure. They need to justify their existence, take in money. They need to mobilize people, but that [censure] doesn't mean anything. You might as well go for impeachment instead of censure.
Snowshoefilms: What's the status of the impeachment campaign?
Boyle: We're keeping the pressure on. What can I say? I have a new book coming out, Destroying World Order. It should be out in six weeks [May 2004], Clarity Press. It sums up the current status of the impeachment campaign. Ramsey Clark and I are moving forward. We're keeping pressure at the grass roots. This is not a problem of drafting. The documents are there.
They just need to be polished up. It's really a question of getting one member of Congress with the guts, like the late [Congressman] Henry B. Gonzalez,** to put a bill of impeachment in. We'll all mobilize behind him But right now we don't have anyone.
Snowshoefilms: Why wouldn't Kucinich, at this point in the campaign, sign on to impeachment?
Boyle: He was asked that at the beginning of the campaign and he said he was trying to unite and felt impeachment would divide us.... So I don't know where he stands now. I support him, the positions he's been taking. I'm not questioning his good faith one way or the other. I don't know where he stands now [on impeachment].
We're just moving forward with the grass roots because the members of Congress are afraid. Plus, many of them are compromised because they supported the war against Iraq. We've got to find someone who's against the war and has a safe seat, and isn't afraid. And there aren't that many. I don't know what Kucinich will do if he's no longer running. Maybe he'll put it in.
WAR AGAINST SYRIA (OR THE U.S.?) IF KARL ROVE THINKS BUSH IS LOSING
The main concern, though, is this - Noam Chomsky said the same thing - if we get to September and they think they're going to lose the election, they'll go to war, probably against Syria... It's just like what happened in the 2002 congressional campaign. Karl Rove got the Senate back and more
votes in the House by going to war against Iraq. And they'll do the same thing this time. I think the most likely target is Syria. They're setting Syria up for an attack. So they'll sit there and wait and see how things turn out and after everyone goes on vacation in August, after Labor Day weekend, if they're going to lose, I think they'll got to war. Chomsky gave a lecture down in Cuba and he said the same thing. He didn't identify Syria, but he said if they conclude it's the only way they're going to win an election, they'll go to war.
Snowshoefilms: What about [Michel] Chossudovsky's notion that another internal major event could be - could occur - and that would be an internal war...
Boyle: Right.
* See, e.g., David Brock's Blinded by the Right, 2002.
** Bill of Impeachment, Jan. 16, 1991 (see Ramsey Clark, The Fire This
Time
(US War Crimes in the Gulf), 1992, p. 159.
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STOPPING A POLICE STATE
Excerpts of an interview with Professor Boyle, University of Illinois , Champaign-Urbana. The interview was conducted April 28, 2003 in the professor's office. The interview is part three of a series.
http://images.indymedia.org/imc/chicago/boylethree28.rm
Transcript: The Federalist Society
"Justice Rehnquist joined the Supreme Court before the founding of the Federalist Society, but the four colleagues that he works with in the 5-4 majority that we've seen now for several years - Scalia, Thomas, Kennedy, O'Connor have been members of the Federalist Society, appear at their functions, and work with them -- and he works quite closely with those four Justices...This same 5-4 majority gave the Presidency to Bush in violation of the Constitution and a federal statute mandating that disputed elections get decided by Congress - the House of Representatives.
"You have to understand the agenda of the Federalist Society is to turn the United States and the federal judiciary back to before Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. That is how reactionary the Federalist Society really is. Ashcroft is a member. His deputy Viet Dinh, who drafted Patriot Act I and Patriot Act II is a prominent member. White House counsel Gonzales is a member. His entire staff are members. Most of the Bush federal judiciary appointees are members of the Federalist Society...
"You do not have to accept my word for that. It was Lawrence Walsh who has also said the same thing. Judge Walsh was independent counsel in the Iran/Contra scandal, by appointment of the Reagan administration. He's a life-long Republican. He worked for Dewey in New York . He then became deputy attorney general for President Eisenhower, and then a federal district judge, president of the American Bar Association. Judge Walsh is a conservative, as traditionally defined, and a conservative Republican. And even he has publicly condemned the Federalist Society for trying to turn the federal judiciary, and this country, back beyond Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. I think that gives you an idea of how radical these ideologues really are, and how dangerous their philosophies and practices are. And we are seeing this now - every day - in the Bush administration, at the White House, at the Department of Justice, and many of the other executive offices that have been populated by Federalist Society Lawyers."
International Criminal Court
"Right now a case is being prepared in the International Criminal Court in the Hague against Tony Blair and British government officials because Britain is a party to the Rome statute on the International Criminal Court. The US is not. President Clinton signed it. Bush repudiated that immediately upon coming to power [and] has done everything humanly possible to sabotage the International Criminal Court. And the reason is obvious. If you are contemplating an aggressive war against Afghanistan , and an aggressive war against Iraq , you do not want an International Criminal Court looking over your shoulder. That being said, I believe it would be possible to include President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, certainly Deputy Secretary of Defense Wolfowitz, Tommy Franks and the others, in the British complaint - as aiders and abettors, conspirators, those who are complicit. Basically you need to establish a nexus, and the nexus would be: Britain is a party [of the ICC] and Bush et al. are aiders and abettors, facilitators, co-conspirators. They're complicit, they're accomplices..."
Impeachment
"Last October, in light of the two horrendous speeches given by Vice President Cheney calling for a preventive war against Iraq, I set up a national campaign to impeach Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Ashcroft - and have been working on it ever since then...a group of 10 students here set up a committee. We have a web page. We've contacted just about every member of Congress - in support of my draft bill of impeachment. Finally, on March 11, 2003, Congressman John Conyers, ranking member of the House judiciary committee, that has jurisdiction over any bill of impeachment, called for a meeting in Washington, DC to discuss introducing a draft bill of impeachment against President Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Ashcroft.
"At the meeting were 40 to 50 of his top advisors, most of whom were lawyers. And Congressman Conyers invited in myself and former Attorney General Ramsey Clark to argue the case for impeaching them all.
"Ramsey also set up his campaign - I believe it was January 17, 2003 . We are working independently of each other, but in the same direction. For two hours, Ramsey and I did the best we could (this was before the war started) to put in a bill of impeachment right away. Most of the lawyers and advisors there are affiliated with the Democratic National Committee (I'm not. I'm a political independent.) and they seemed to take the position that it would be politically inexpedient for the Democratic Party to put in a bill of impeachment at this time. I didn't argue that point. It's not for me to tell the Democrats how to get their people elected. I just argued the merits of the issue: violations of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, Human Rights, the UN Charter, international law, etc.
"Today there is now a second, revised draft bill of impeachment sitting on Capitol Hill. It is there. It is in circulation. What we need now is pressure being brought to bear on member of Congress to put this bill in - and to make it clear that this is not a question of political expediency, rather this is a question of our future republic.
"With all the faults and imperfections and defects and indeed sometimes the crimes this republic has committed, not only here internally - African Americans, American Indians - but externally, we are still the oldest republic in the world - but you are going to have to act to keep it that way. Because Bush and Ashcroft, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz want to turn this into a police state at home and an empire abroad. So I would encourage you all, contact members of Congress. They have to listen to their constituents. Tell them you want that bill in right away, and that you will support them when they put that bill in."
updated May 2003
Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit >
sent by Francis A. Boyle - August 27, 2004
Snowshoe Films
http://www.snowshoefilms.com/transcriptcensureisnotenough.html
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