Here’s an organization called the Lawfare project–about "the use of law as a weapon of war"–which obviously has some money. They’re having a gala conference in New York on March 11, with a host of speakers. It’s essentially the Israel lobby in sheep’s clothing. They’re fighting "the abuse of the law & legal systems for strategic ends," whatever that means. What it means is the effort to "delegitimize democratic nations such as the U.S. and Israel." Wait, pal, who’s delegitimizing the U.S.? No one I know. I.e., this is a false agenda. It’s about just Israel–which, yes, some are seeking to delegitimize. Also on the agenda: "Frustrate the war on terrorism." Struth! as the Aussies say.
I think this group goes under the category of anti-Goldstone projects: "The Lawfare Project is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to raising awareness about the abuse of the international legal system."
Note that Canadian Israel lobbyist Irwin Cotler is a prominent speaker at the hoe-down. Also mustachioed Dore Gold, who battled Goldstone at Brandeis. The event is chaired by Robert Morgenthau and David Schizer, the dean of Columbia Law School. Now why is the Columbia dean (a tax specialist and grandson of a Hebrew teacher) hosting this neocon bash? What’s that about?
Put another way, why does Harvard retain the official standing of a neocon "scholar" who has called for the West working to lower the Palestinian birthrate? It’s about money. That’s the bottom line. Follow the money. And right now, that’s where the money is, in neoconservatism/supporting Israel. I wonder whether Schizer’s participation has anything to do with efforts to keep money going into the Columbia president Bollinger’s wouldbe legacy, of expanding into West Harlem.
i thought they were saying Ztruth.
“The Lawfare Project is a not-for-direct-profit organization dedicated to dimming awareness about the use of the international legal system.”
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It’s essentially the Israel lobby in sheep’s clothing.
I’ve heard lawyers compared to a lot of different animals, but never to sheep.
Nothing personal, Citizen. Some of my best friends are lawyers, honest.
link to thelawfareproject.org
About Us
The Lawfare Project is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to raising awareness about the abuse of the international legal system. The Project’s goal is to facilitate a response to the perversion and missaplication of human rights law, mobilize resources and bring interested parties together in a common forum.
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RE: “an organization called the Lawfare project”
FROM JUAN COLE, 11/04/07:
…Not until the Bush administration, however, was this political code word integrated into the National Security Doctrine of the United States. Scott Horton of Harper’s, writing on “Bush’s War on the Rule of Law” describes how the attack on judicial activism entered national security doctrine through the concept of “lawfare”:
According to Major General Charles J. Dunlap Jr., now the Air Force’s deputy judge advocate general, lawfare is the “strategy of using or misusing law as a substitute for traditional military means to achieve an operational objective.” As the neoconservative lawyers David Rivkin and Lee Casey have put it, lawfare aims to “gain a moral advantage over your enemy in the court of world opinion, and potentially a legal advantage in national and international tribunals.” The concept, which has been discussed in the Federalist Society and at National Review Online, became doctrine in the March 2005 National Defense Strategy of the United States of America: “Our strength as a nation state will continue to be challenged by those who employ a strategy of the weak using international fora, judicial processes, and terrorism.” Note the equation of “international fora, judicial processes, and terrorism.” In other words, turning to courts for the enforcement of legal rights, appeals to international tribunals, and terrorism are seen as the elements of a single consistent enemy strategy. In the strange reasoning of the lawfare theorists, lawyers who defend their clients, or who present their claims to domestic or international courts, might as well be terrorists themselves…
SOURCE – link to icga.blogspot.com
RE: neoconservative lawyer David Rivkin
SEE: Lawrence O’Donnell Rips Into Torture Apologist David Rivkin (04:10) –
link to youtube.com
The Center for Law & Counterterrorism – CLC (a project of The Foundation for Defense of Democracies – FDD)
The CLC was established by FDD in January of 2007.
The war against terror will not be won on the battlefield alone, and few people know that better than the co-chairs of the Center for Law and Counterterrorism (CLC), Andrew C. McCarthy, one of the nation’s leading experts on terrorism and the law, and David Rivkin, a partner at the law firm Baker Hostetler LLP and former White House official. The CLC examines the myriad legal issues that arise in the prosecution of the global campaign against radical Islamist terrorists. It is a joint project of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the National Review Institute.
LINK – link to defenddemocracy.org
David B. Rivkin Jr. and Lee A. Casey, two lawyers employed in the D.C. office of Baker Hostetler LLP
(EXCERPT) …David B. Rivkin Jr. and Lee A. Casey (No relation.) have an article up on the WaPo discussing one of the more autocratic but less talked about elements of HR 3200, the “individual mandates.”
> Washington Post-President Obama has called for a serious and reasoned debate about his plans to overhaul the health-care system. Any such debate must include the question of whether it is constitutional for the federal government to adopt and implement the president’s proposals. Consider one element known as the “individual mandate,” which would require every American to have health insurance, if not through an employer then by individual purchase…In short, no. The Constitution assigns only limited, enumerated powers to Congress and none, including the power to regulate interstate commerce or to impose taxes, would support a federal mandate requiring anyone who is otherwise without health insurance to buy it.<
SOURCE – link to westernexperience.wordpress.com
The power to regulate commerce, the commerce clause, has been used to authorize virtually anything. Many court decisions are a testament to specious reasoning.
I have some ideas for new organisations, based on Lawfare’s wonderful example: Peacefare, Lovefare, Cuddlefare, Childfare and Motherfare. Any potential funders out there?
Hey, you forgot about Well-fare, Cabfare, and Countyfare. And what exactly is a “not-for-direct-profit” organization? It sounds like a money-laundering scheme.
This bunch of crap gave us lessons on free speech but they are not good examples.
- François Henri Briad is big friend of Israel and the other names i assume are part of the same camp, if you they don’t invite someone having opposite views to debate with them.
Antiseptic Lecture at Hebrew University– on Lawfare:
link to attorneygeneral.gov.uk
Clearly Zionists are worried about the Goldstone Report and arrest of their leaders
outside of Israel. The copycat USA should be too.
Background on Lawfare–originated when Israelis were put on trial for war crimes:
link to ngo-monitor.org
Ohhhhhh. They mean that leading human rights groups, the UN and the legal systems of a number of European countries have been engaging in nefarious “lawfare”, while Cotler, Gold, Morgenthau, Bolton and all the others are just trying to protect us from them and uphold real human rights law. And here I was thinking that they were the brave lawfaring lawriors. Got it now.
By the way, I noticed that Lawfare Project’s upcoming conference is sponsored by the “European” front group for Pat Robertson’s “American Center for Peace and Justice”. War is peace.
Looks like John Yoo, Alberto Gonzales and Donald Rumsfeld have another job opportunity to fall back on. Go Team Torture!
Those who run the drones (and Israel has her new huge one out on display) and knock down doors in the middle of the night want to be sure that their targeted assassinations and”oops” collateral damage don’t come back to haunt them. Probably the same reason that Cheney is sooooo active – trying to stay in front of torture charges.
Remember that only several days ago Rep. Ackerman was telling his audience that the U.S in Iraq had far surpassed what Goldstone had reported on Israel in Gaza.
So now in the same way that John Yoo and friends figured out how to allow torture and get away with it, Rivkin and friends are figuring out ways to protect those who are making the decisions for us that result in collateral damage or operational manuevers that a U.S. citizen would not want occurring to them.
Geneva conventions move over: John Yoo and David Rivkin know better. We need moral and legal bypasses. The legal rules of engagement need to change to protect the strong. I think that this is what it is all about…..and in a year or so we will see Congress calling for the same.
Lawfare and Delegitamization are two terms that it is not too difficult to get one’s head around.
We tend to use different words to describe the same process we would like to see happen in different states. Israel needs ‘reform’. Iran needs ‘regime change’.
Many agree that Israel needs to withdraw its colonies from the Occupied Palestinian Territory in order to preserve itself as a Jewish and democratic state. The myriad problems from colonial Zionism that the United States, Israel and its neighbors, and the rest of the world, i.e. the global economy, endure won’t end with withdrawal of the colonies, even if that were remotely possible.
The fundamental reality is that the Israeli political establishment has never been serious about negotiating a genuinely just and stable agreement with Palestinians or any other Arab people. Agreements between Israel, Jordan and Egypt were purchased with massive bribes to the latters’ autocratic rulers, at US taxpayer expense, while Israel continues to occupy both Lebanese and Syrian national territory.
The root problem is the Israeli political establishment. It’s political and social culture are deeply expansionist, militaristic, and racist. The recurring pattern of war, occupation, ethnic cleansing, and colonization needs to end. It’s time to talk explicitly about regime change in Israel in the same sense we use it for Iran: a change in governance, not an end to a people.
“What it means is the effort to “delegitimize democratic nations such as the U.S. and Israel.” Wait, pal, who’s delegitimizing the U.S.? No one I know. I.e., this is a false agenda”
This is stupid, Phil. People criticize the US (i.e., “delegitimize it”) for its war crimes, same as Israel. Neither country seems capable of investigating and prosecuting its own war criminals.
The only difference is that the US shrugs off this criticism as inconsequential, but it terrifies the Israelis.
Why should Israel change? Ike’s not in charge anymore. Nothing to worry about with the sequence of toddlers put in the oval orifice’s hi-chair. I suppose the Corrie Family case against Caterpillar is viewed as lawfare too. The political question doctrine was dredged up to dismiss that case. You see the US Government paid Israel to buy all those bulldozers Israel uses “for defence.” (Here’s our government’s amicus curie brief explictly saying so: link to ccrjustice.org
Interestingly there’s a lot of cases filed against US corporations who serviced the former apartheid South African state–still on various legal holds, not dismissed, after all these years.
I think what’s patently absurd about this conference is the idea that the rest of the world is going to respond to what these legal quacks are up to. Yeah, Europe kind of remembers first hand what handling international disputes without the United Nations and Geneva Conventions and all that is like. They aren’t exactly going to give that up and go back to the years of the World Wars just because some yahoos who’s daddies bought them law degrees in the US ask them to.
Bonus points for the sheer idiotic irony of Israel and its supporters actively lobbying to strip away international protections for human rights that were formulated as a specific response to the Holocaust, as well.
What saddens me, is that our relationship with Israel is literally killing the United States, as a nation. In a healthy political system, a back-stabbing greedy unprincipled politician who tries to sabotage the Presidential candidate of the party that helped him get his office would be considered a disgraced pariah. Instead, Joe Lieberman is still the committee chair of Homeland Security and is invested with the deciding vote on whether health care reform lives or dies in the Senate. Thank you, AIPAC! We’ll see you in Iran, I guess.
Here’s a class-action apartheid lawsuit against US corporations, which include Daimler, Ford and IBM.
After years of litigation a US court last year gave the green light for them to be sued on US soil under the Alien Tort Claims Act.
The little-used law requires companies with a substantial presence in the United States to obey US law everywhere in the world.
link to mg.co.za
Will this case be dismissed under the political question doctrine as was the Corrie case against Caterpiller? Corrie also pleaded under the ATCA inter alia.
Considering the American legal system now basically legalizes torture, on anyone, anywhere, when the President feels we “really really need to do it,” I don’t exactly have much confidence in this. Hell, how many decades have these apartheid lawsuits been stalled? And now corporate domination of the US government is stronger than it ever was.
There is no justice now, in Mudville, because Obama has struck out.
I’d bet Obama has signed off on these S African apartheid law suits, as he did not do on the Corrie lawsuit. Shrub never signed off on the S African apartheid law suits or the corrie lawsuit.
Israel is de legitimizing itself and by consequence its supporters (The US), i gave an example in another post this morning about the Israeli immigrant children who are born in Israel and who will get expelled because they are not Jewish. Including half Jewish children from Israeli Jewish father. I mean when you read how are we supposed to react? For me its really shocking and to be condemned, on the other hand, my position which has nothing of hate, and that will make labelled Israeli hater, anti-semi and all the sort of things.
The article about the Israeli children link to news.bbc.co.uk
I m off topic but i just received a message from a friend in Haiti and guess what Israelis left Haiti and the ones who remained there are the ones who usually pointed out as inhuman have a look at this pic link to photos-c.ak.fbcdn.net
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I see all of these mechanization’s talking about the “rule of law,” when in reality there is no rule of law, only the “law of rule.” That is because unless law is equally applicable to all, there is no “rule” in the sense of reign taking place. What you have is a group that thinks they are above law, because they have reached a supposed apex in society. The “rule of law” farce (in reality) is a strange thing, because it is merely the next phase to the divine right of Kings, when men believed that kings were bequeathed with no restraint because they represented some deity. The rule of law concept has not changed any of the players, it has merely masked them behind a supposed “objective” law, like a rule of nature – and anyone who knows the “workings of law” understands that this is ridiculous.
All that is occurring here is the chickens have come home to roost. They, the new cadre of elite, just assume it is their turn to twist everything to their design. So, once again, this goes much deeper than merely some rogue element in the ruling class.
The rule of lawsuit is what they want. The side with the most lawyers wins.
Lawfare is apparently a neo-con concept that has been discussed in the Federalist society, whether publicly or not I don’t know. The Simon Wiesenthal Center is deeply involved in promoting the concept, and recently claimed to have facilitated a conference in Israel about it–naturally, the SWC believes that the Goldstone report, which after all is simply a fact-finding report, is the prime current example of lawfare. I believe that the Lawfare Profect is probably getting funding from the same sources as the Wiesenthal Center–from very rich, stupid, rightwing people who believe that Israel and Judaism are the same thing and that anybody who criticizes Israel is an anti-Semite.
What it boils down to is that some progressive forces in the world are trying to fashion a new international law, partly through precedent invoked by the World Court, and partly through judgments from that body. At the same time Israel is responsible for the longest and worst military occupation in the world, so the arrogant and right-wing governments of Israel are taking some heat. The Holy Staters (powerful people that believe that they cannot allow criticism of Israel) naturally claim, and probably believe, that all this is terribly unfair–”lawfare,” as they would have it–and represent themselves as victims of a conspiracy. In reality, it is simply another way to attack people for talking about the suffering of Palestinians under apartheid.
The concept of a body of international law is one of the best outcomes of the rise of human rights organizations since the Second World War. The idea behind it is that all people everywhere have human rights that are inalienable, and which they receive at birth. Of course Israel and the Israel Lobby are attacking the human rights organizations for exactly that reason, because the human rights organizations value the rights of Israeli Jews and Palestinians equally.
The idea that there is are over-arching values that go beyond profit and power was also the orientation of what was in the past called public-interest law in the US, the best modern use of which Ralph Nadar pioneered. I may have this wrong, but is seems like the best of international law often operates in much the same way, in trying to establish the same standards of fairness and human rights for all people.
The “lawfare” people are simply bust-out charlatans who are promoting their own neo-fascist brand of Zionism, and doing it dishonestly. But they are also doing profound harm to the organized Jewish community in the US, because they are promoting the idea of conspiracies rather than discussing what is really going on–and when the organized Jewish community is obsessed with conspiracy, it harms all public life in the US
The Goldstone Report is being taken up at the UN General Assembly on Friday. It’s too bad its findings were not more widely aired before this.
It will become unavoidably big news when the US vetoes what comes before the Security Council, a little farther up the road. If that’s any consolation.
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