West Point professor calls on US military to target legal critics of war on terror
US military academy official William Bradford argues that attacks on scholars’ home offices and media outlets – along with Islamic holy sites – are legitimate.
The uniformity of the military mind is well captured in this image by Kevin Lamarque (Reuters). Conformity is especially dangerous when the people in uniform are young, impressionable, and largely brainwashed, as most cadets are—just about everywhere. The official caption reads: “Underclassmen attend a commencement ceremony at the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York. Photograph: Kevin Lamarque/Reuters Spencer Ackerman in New York @attackerman.”
By Spencer Ackerman / The Guardian
[dropcap]A[/dropcap]n assistant professor in the law department of the US Military Academy at West Point has argued that legal scholars critical of the war on terrorism represent a “treasonous” fifth column that should be attacked as enemy combatants.
In a lengthy academic paper, the professor, William C Bradford, proposes to threaten “Islamic holy sites” as part of a war against undifferentiated Islamic radicalism. That war ought to be prosecuted vigorously, he wrote, “even if it means great destruction, innumerable enemy casualties, and civilian collateral damage”.
Other “lawful targets” for the US military in its war on terrorism, Bradford argues, include “law school facilities, scholars’ home offices and media outlets where they give interviews” – all civilian areas, but places where a “causal connection between the content disseminated and Islamist crimes incited” exist.
“Shocking and extreme as this option might seem, [dissenting] 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,” Bradford wrote.
West Point is the revered undergraduate institution north of New York City where the US army educates its future officer corps. It prides itself on the rigor of its curriculum. Representatives from the school said Bradford had only begun his employment there on 1 August.
The real question is why does West Point hire and retain such people?
Bradford’s article, “Trahison des Professeurs: The Critical Law of Armed Conflict Academy as an Islamist Fifth Column”, appeared in the most recent issue of the National Security Law Journal, a student-run publication at the George Mason School of Law. Bradford clarifies that the term means “treason of the professors”, itself an allusion to a famous attack on French intellectuals from the 1920s.
In the paper, Bradford identifies himself as an “associate professor of law, national security and strategy, National Defense University”, seemingly his previous job before West Point. But a representative of the National Defense University said Bradford was a contractor at the prestigious Defense Department-run institution, “never an NDU employee nor an NDU professor”.
SIDEBAR
The Unraveling of William Bradford
Read more about the web of deception behind this notorious reactionary. Click on the bar below.
Inside Higher Ed
Web of Lies
Submitted by David Epstein on December 6, 2005 – [dropcap]W[/dropcap]hen several of his colleagues expressed doubts about whether they would eventually want to tenure him, William Bradford, an associate professor of law at Indiana University in Indianapolis, went public with his complaints. He posted on blogs, he talked on the radio, he talked to this Web site, [1] he hit “The O’Reilly Factor.” His message: Liberal faculty members were pushing him out because he is conservative, a war veteran and a Native American who didn’t fit a liberal mold for Native Americans. But as Bradford’s complaints grew louder, his story unraveled. It has now become clear that Bradford lied about, among other things, his military service.
[dropcap]U[/dropcap]niversity officials confirmed Monday that Bradford — who did not respond to e-mail and voice messages and who hasn’t commented on the latest events — has resigned, effective January 1. Bradford appeared on the national radar this summer, after five faculty members on a review committee, which did authorize his reappointment, said they did not think he deserved tenure at the time. Bradford, whose degrees include one each from Northwestern and Harvard Universities, railed against what he claimed was a liberal conspiracy against him. Bradford had refused to sign a petition in support of Ward Churchill, a professor from the University of Colorado whose comments on 9/11 infuriated people nationwide, despite the advice of Florence Wagman Roisman, an Indiana law professor who did sign the petition.
Bradford labeled Roisman as one of the leaders of the push to oust him, and began slinging discrimination and defamation claims around the blogosphere, most prominently on Indy Law Net, [2] a blog for the Indiana law school. Bradford drew vigorous support not only from the likes of Bill O’Reilly, but also from students and colleagues who noted his prolific publishing, his general popularity as a teacher, and his status as a war hero — he claimed to have fought in Desert Storm and Bosnia, and to have won a Silver Star. A petition [2] in support of Bradford was even passed around students at the law school. While Bradford took to the pulpit, Roisman and others he criticized had to stay silent, citing the confidentiality of review committees. But the more attention Bradford got, the more people started asking questions, and the more peculiarities arose.
[dropcap]I[/dropcap]n September, Lucas Sayre, a second year law student and the head of Indy Law Net, noticed that Bradford’s comments were coming from the same IP address as posts from other user names. Sayre, who had taken a course with Bradford and said he was a great professor, questioned Bradford about it, and Bradford admitted to using fake names to post “cheap shots, schoolyard bickering,” Sayre said. In October, Bradford promised the blog audience that the person who endowed Roisman’s chair was upset at her behavior and would strip her of the chair, and that Judge David J. Dreyer of Marion Superior Court had issued a temporary restraining order barring professors from speaking ill of or taking any actions against Bradford. Roisman did not lose her chair, and there never was a restraining order. Naturally, some of the law buffs who frequent Indy Law Net went searching for the restraining order. When a user identified as “me” posted that he or she could not find it, Bradford objected. “Who are you, me? I ask because if you’re on the other side or working for them, which is my presumption unless you tell me otherwise and tell me who you are, I’m not going to give you any more guidance,” he responded in a comment. Court records and sources both indicate that Bradford never filed for any sort of injunction. One part of Bradford’s offensive involved talking with Ruth Holladay, a columnist for The Indianapolis Star who wrote a column supporting him in June. Holladay wrote about Bradford’s impressive military service. On his faculty profile, [3] Bradford is identified as having served in the Army infantry from 1994 to 2001, and he had claimed to have been a major in the Special Forces. Some of Bradford’s deceptions seem obvious. For example, Desert Storm ended in 1991, and Bradford got a Ph.D., a J.D., and an L.L.M. during his supposed years of combat. Other deceptions were less easily penetrated. That’s why it took Ret. Army Lieut. Col. Keith R. Donnelly contacting Holladay with his suspicion that Bradford did not win a Silver Star to bring clarity to that issue. Both Donnelly and Holladay independently requested Bradford’s military records. In her column [4]Sunday, Holladay reported that Bradford had seen no active duty, had won no awards, was discharged as a second lieutenant, and was not in the infantry. Bradford had been in the Army Reserve from September 30, 1995, to October 23, 2001, but saw no active duty. Roisman said she was told that any complaint Bradford had filed against her and other professors with the university would be withdrawn. But Roisman said that neither she nor another professor plan to withdraw their complaints that Bradford had trumped up discrimination accusations against them. “As far as I’m concerned,” Roisman said, “why should they go away?” Sayre said he has contacted Bradford recently, but that Bradford would only confirm his resignation. Once deafening on Indy Law Net, Bradford would tell Sayre nothing more.
Source URL: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2005/12/06/bradford?width=775&height=500&iframe=true Links: [1] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2005/06/28/indiana [2] http://iuilaw.blogspot.com/2005/04/petition.html [3] http://indylaw.indiana.edu/people/profile.cfm?Id=126 [4] http://www.indystar.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20051204/COLUMNISTS02/512040470&SearchID=73228533782766[/learn_more] 
END OF SIDEBAR. REGULAR TEXT RESUMES HERE.
[dropcap]I[/dropcap]t appears not to be the first time Bradford misrepresented his credentials. He resigned from Indiana University’s law school in 2005 after his military record showed he had exaggerated his service. (Among his paper’s criticisms of supposedly treasonous lawyers is “intellectual dishonesty”.)
The National Security Law Journal’s editor-in-chief has called the article’s publication a “mistake” and an “egregious breach of professional decorum”.
“We cannot ‘unpublish’ it, of course, but we can and do acknowledge that the article was not presentable for publication when we published it, and that we therefore repudiate it with sincere apologies to our readers,” the editor-in-chief, Rick Myers, wrote on the journal’s website.
Bradford does not clearly name his academic opponents, instead using the neologistic acronym CLOACA, for “critical law of armed conflict academy” to describe them. (In nature, “cloaca” is also the name of a body cavity into which intestinal, reproductive and urinary tracts empty in some animal species.)
The CLOACA, in turn, are part of a GMAC, or “government-media-academic complex”, which Bradford defines as an “aristocracy of senior government officials, elite media members, and university faculty, which squeezes non-members from public colloquy and shapes opinion on security, military and legal issues.”
This “clique of about forty” scholars, Bradford writes, have “converted the US legal academy into a cohort whose vituperative pronouncements on the illegality of the US resort to force and subsequent conduct in the war against Islamism” represent a “super-weapon that supports Islamist military operations” aimed at “American political will” to fight. They are supported by “compliant journalists” marked by “defeatism, instinctive antipathy to war, and empathy for American adversaries”, but Bradford considers the lawyers a greater threat.
The offending legal scholars “effectively tilt the battlefield against US forces [and] contribute to timorousness and lethargy in US military commanders”, he writes. They are among several “useful idiots” who “separate Islam from Islamists by attributing to the former principles in common with the West, including ‘justice and progress’ and ‘the dignity of all human beings’”.
Bradford derisively quotes Barack Obama, who has prosecuted a globalized war against al-Qaida and now the Islamic State, discussing “co-existence and cooperation” with the Islamic world in his 2009 Cairo speech.
The West Point faculty member urges the US to wage “total war” on “Islamism”, using “conventional and nuclear force and [psychological operations]”, in order to “leave them prepared to coexist with the West or be utterly eradicated”. He suggests in a footnote that “threatening Islamic holy sites might create deterrence, discredit Islamism, and falsify the assumption that decadence renders Western restraint inevitable”.
Robert Chesney of the University of Texas, a founding editor of the influential national-security law blog Lawfare, is one of the legal scholars Bradford references as pernicious – for a 2011 paper that largely defended Obama’s execution without trial of US citizen and al-Qaida preacher Anwar al-Awlaki.
“It’s very hard to take this seriously except insofar as he may actually be teaching nonsense like this to cadets at West Point,” Chesney said.
Bradford did not respond to emails and phone messages for comment.
A spokesman for the US Military Academy, army lieutenant colonel Christopher Kasker, told the Guardian: “Dr William Bradford was hired on 1 August 2015 at the US Military Academy. His article in the National Security Law Journal titled ‘Trahison des Professeurs: The Critical Law of Armed Conflict Academy as an Islamist Fifth Column’ was written and accepted for publication prior to his employment at West Point. The views in the article are solely those of Dr Bradford and do not reflect those of the Department of Defense, the United States army, the United States Military Academy.”
The US military’s educational institutions have come under fire before for promoting “total war” against Islam. In 2012, General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, ordered a comprehensive scouring of anti-Islam training material after a course proposed “Hiroshima” tactics against Islamic holy sites, targeting the “civilian population wherever necessary”.
The previous year, highly regarded counter-terrorism scholars affiliated with the US army aided the FBI in eradicating similar material from its own training. Those scholars came from West Point.
Additional reporting by Kira Goldenberg and Megan Carpentier
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