West Point law prof resigns after arguing pacifist legal scholars could be attacked by military
A professor in West Point’s law department has resigned after claiming in a legal treatise that some U.S. legal scholars are exhibiting “pernicious pacifism” that is helping ISIS undermine America from within.
The law professor, William Bradford, argued that the legal scholars who criticize the war on terror are a treasonous fifth column that could be attacked as enemy combatants, the Guardian reports. The Atlantic and Above the Law noted the Guardian story and reported on the aftermath.
Bradford deems the pacifist professors the “counter-law-of-armed-conflict academy,” and refers to them with the acronym “CLOACA,” which is a term for a type of animal body cavity. CLOACA scholarship and advocacy, he argues, are prosecutable combatant acts that incite others to war crimes. As unlawful combatants, “CLOACA propagandists are subject to coercive interrogation, trial and imprisonment,” he writes.
The U.S. military could go further, at least in theory, he suggests.
“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,” he writes.
Bradford also argues that “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.”
Bradford published his claims (PDF) in the student-run National Security Law Journal, leading the incoming editorial board to issue a statement opining that the article wasn’t fit for publication. He had started work at West Point on Aug. 1.
An analysis (PDF) by George Mason University law professor Jeremy Rabkin says Bradford’s article is “bonkers” and an “embarrassment” for a scholarly journal.
“The article deploys the classic elements of popular mobilization,” Rabkin writes, “as practiced by totalitarian regimes: Designating critics as traitors, spreading dark warnings of lurking conspiracies, barking about the urgent need to silence defeatist talk because the nation is besieged by relentless enemies, already at our gates.”
Bradford’s resignation follows Guardian revelations that he has apparently inflated his credentials.
Bradford had resigned from Indiana University in 2005 amid claims that he had exaggerated his military service, according to the Guardian. In his new treatise, Bradford says he worked as an associate law professor at National Defense University before West Point. But a representative of National Defense University says Bradford was a contractor and “never an NDU employee nor an NDU professor.”
