Washington Post: A West Point law professor has resigned after arguing that fellow legal scholars who criticize the war on terrorism are “treasonous” and should be arrested, interrogated and even attacked as “unlawful enemy combatants.”
William C. Bradford resigned from his post on Sunday following an uproar over a paper titled “Trahison des Professeurs” (Treason of the Professors), published in the National Security Law Journal in July.
…The Guardian first drew attention to Bradford on Saturday, pointing out that his paper went as far as to advocate attacking “Islamic holy sites” as part of a “total war” on Islamist radicalism.
But it was Bradford’s call for legal scholars “sympathetic to Islamist aims” to be imprisoned, “attacked” and, it is implied, even killed that has drawn the most criticism.
In his paper, Bradford argued that a “clique of about forty” legal scholars critical of the war on terrorism — from his footnotes, their ranks appear to include professors at top schools like Harvard, Princeton and NYU — comprise a “super-weapon that supports Islamist military operations” aimed at “American political will” to fight.
Using the acronym CLOACA, which ostensibly stands for “critical law of armed conflict academy” but is also the name for an animal’s anus, Bradford’s article painted these supposedly “treasonous” scholars as “a Western Fifth Column” of Islamist terrorism that should be treated as such. He even went as far as to suggest that the law schools where they work or the journalists they speak to could also be targeted.
“As unlawful combatants for failure to wear the distinctive insignia of a party, CLOACA propagandists are subject to coercive interrogation, trial, and imprisonment,” he wrote. “Further, the infrastructure used to create and disseminate CLOACA propaganda — law school facilities, scholars’ home offices, and media outlets where they give interviews —are also lawful targets given the causal connection between the content disseminated and Islamist crimes incited. Shocking and extreme as this option might seem, CLOACA 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.”
…In an article picking apart Bradford’s argument piece by piece, Matt Ford, an associate editor at the Atlantic, pointed out that “Treason of the Professors” may not even be Bradford’s most controversial work.
“Since 2014, according to what is apparently his LinkedIn page, he has been circulating an article for publication entitled, ‘Alea Iacta Est: The U.S. Coup of 2017,’” Ford wrote on Monday. “The abstract is strewn with thinly-veiled references to President Obama, asking, for example, ‘What conditions precedent would be required before the American military would be justified in using or threatening force to oust a U.S. president attempting to “fundamentally transform the United States of America”?’ Although describing it simply as a ‘heuristic test of a proferred theory,’ it also wonders aloud, ‘Is such a duty incumbent upon the U.S. armed forces at present?’ That’s a disquieting question for a faculty member to pose, when he’s charged with instructing the nation’s officer corps.”
In his e-mail to The Post, Bradford wrote that “Alea Iacta Est” (ominous Latin translation: “the die is cast”) was “an unpublished work, the purpose of which is to examine whether a coup might be possible in the U.S. and how best to ensure that it never occurs. Comments about this article are clearly made by those who haven’t read it.”
Similarly, Bradford told The Post that “Treason of the Professors” outlines “a spectrum of modalities preferable to more coercive measures,” such as arrest, interrogation or outright attacks. “My article indicates that only true propagandists inciting attacks could be subjected to the sanctions I mention, and this parallels existing case law I reference as well as emerging customary international law.”
