Boycott CU, TT & UCB
Ever since America was founded, two of its fundamental institutions—its legal system and its system of higher education—have been synonymous with ethics, integrity and fairness.
But beneath the Statue of Justice’s blindfold and within the confines of academia’s ivory towers lurk amoralities, mendacities and biases so virulent that even Machiavelli would blush.
Even those who just cursorily follow the news in America cannot help but notice that scarcely a month (and sometimes scarcely a week) goes by before there is another story about a wrongfully convicted person being released after years of imprisonment. In many of these cases, corrupt prosecutors often obtained convictions by intentionally withholding evidence that would have exonerated the accused. Yet, in almost every case, none of these prosecutors suffered any legal consequences for their actions, and some even went on to become judges, proving, once again, the axiom that America’s legal system actually rewards criminality if the crimes benefit those who control the system.
Doubters need only observe the antics of Rick Perry, the crackpot governor of Texas, the very state where many of these wrongful convictions, and much of this prosecutorial misconduct, occurred. In recent weeks, Perry has been busily replacing several members of a panel investigating whether Cameron Todd Willingham was wrongfully executed in 2004. Although Perry describes these replacements as “routine,” many skeptics suspect he is actually attempting to exert undue influence over this panel to protect his political aspirations, particularly since Perry refused to stop Willingham’s execution even though he was allegedly in possession of a report that proved the “forensic science” used to convict Willingham was fundamentally flawed.
Meanwhile, in another mockery of justice, The Dishonorable Jay Bybee now sits on the United States Federal Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit—the same Jay Bybee who had, while working as a “Justice” Department attorney during the Bush dictatorship, endorsed the use of torture, illegal detentions and other violations of the United States Constitution.
But America’s legal system is not the only institution that embraces torturers and war criminals. At the University of California, Berkeley (UCB) John Yoo, another torture endorsing, constitution loathing war criminal from Bush’s “Justice” Department, currently teaches law, and Texas Tech University (TT) recently hired Alberto Gonzales, a war criminal, torturer and possible perjurer, who led Bush’s “Justice” Department before resigning in disgrace in 2007.
These symbolic embraces of Yoo and Gonzales contrast starkly with the ordeal of Ward Churchill, once a tenured professor at the University of Colorado (CU), who was fired after writing a controversial essay about the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Although CU tried to contend that Churchill was actually fired for plagiarism and other forms of research misconduct, a Colorado jury disagreed and returned a verdict in Churchill’s favor.
But when Churchill subsequently appeared before Judge Larry Naves for a remedial hearing, Naves vacated the jury’s verdict and refused to reinstate Churchill or award him any financial compensation.
Regular readers of my work in Pravda.Ru will realize I have visited the Churchill case before. Although I apologize for this repetition, I believe far too many Americans are unaware of how the Churchill case could negatively affect their own rights and freedoms, or the rights and freedoms of their children. So it is imperative to continually expose the evils that CU and Naves have fomented before they become inextricably entrenched in America’s legal system.
Although many defenders of CU and Naves have myopically focused on Churchill and his controversial remarks, the true ramifications of his case are much larger. American history has repeatedly demonstrated that constitutional rights are invariably weakened or lost whenever governmental institutions (including public universities) target people and groups that few are willing to defend. And even though a judgment rendered in a single court case (such as Churchill’s) may only seem relevant to the litigants involved, the precedents many of these cases set can detrimentally impact the fundamental rights, and lives, of millions for years to come.
America’s so-called “Patriot Act,” for example, sailed through Congress with barely a whimper of protest, because the fear of terrorism overwhelmed concerns about the diminishment of civil liberties. Americans were also lulled into believing the act would only be used against suspected terrorists.
Years later it was revealed that provisions of the Patriot Act had been abused by the FBI and other governmental organizations to illegally spy upon, and violate the privacy rights of, people and organizations with no links to terrorism—abuses that Gonzales, in his role as attorney general, allegedly knew were occurring.
