... today we not only have a years-long unwinnable war, but also torture, kidnappings and renderings to foreign countries for torture, many years of detention without trial of people who are innocent, the use of massive private armies to help carry out Executive policies, electronic spying on anyone and everyone the Executive wishes, suppression of the media far beyond anything experienced during Viet Nam, reducing Congress to an impotency exceeding that of Viet Nam, the use of Executive Branch lawyers to write professionally incompetent, secret memoranda giving clearance to awful policies, and the use of retired generals who are making a fortune from the Pentagon to spread its gospel on the mainstream media...
..what assurance is there that five or ten or twenty or thirty years down the road, when some militarists or reactionaries might again come to power, we will not get Iraq redux, just as Iraq was Viet Nam redux?...
Because domestic politics are obviously useless for holding the guilty accountable, we must try to do what was done in the 1940s to the leaders of nations who committed evil; we must try to do what was done to the German and Japanese leaders from top Nazis and Tojo right down to lawyers and judges. We must try to have them held accountable in courts of law. And we must insist on appropriate punishments, including, if guilt is found, the hangings visited upon top Germans and Japanese....

It is for all these reasons that I have called a conference to be held in Andover, MA on September 13 and 14, 2008. The conference is entitled Planning For The Prosecution Of High Level American War Criminals. The Conference is not intended to be only a discussion of violations of law that have occurred. Although discussions of ideas and facts showing violations of law will take place, library stacks and the internet are, as said, already bulging with materials showing violations (although in the last analysis decisions on violations will be made by judges if leaders are brought to justice). The Conference, rather, is intended to also be a planning conference, one at which plans will be laid, and necessary organizational structures will be set up, to pursue the guilty as long as necessary and to the ends of the earth in order to bring them before the bar of justice. The underlying law and facts will be discussed in the context of laying plans to pursue the guilty in courtrooms so that in future there may be no more Viet Nams, no more Iraqs...Both experts and the public are invited to the Conference.nyone who wants to attend the conference should contact my special assistant, Jeff Demers, at demers@mslaw.edu or at (978) 681-0800...

This is the audio version of Dean Lawrence R. Velvel's blog, www.velvelonnationalaffairs.com
For more information on The Massachusetts School of Law, log on to www.mslaw.edu
And to hear (and see!) the history of MSL, please visit "Against the Tide" on www.podiobooks.com or in the podcast section of iTunes

...We know that thousands of people have been killed or injured because of defective and dangerous drugs and devices or inadequate warnings on labels. Unless everything the Times has written is a lie, we know that this disaster is in part due to the F.D.A.’s incompetence and its insufficient staff and money. We know that drug companies take advantage of the F.D.A.’s inadequacies to put defective products on the market, or products with insufficient warnings on their labels, and thereby also cause the deaths and injuries...

This is the audio version of Dean Lawrence R. Velvel's blog, www.velvelonnationalaffairs.com
For more information on The Massachusetts School of Law, log on to www.mslaw.edu
And to hear (and see!) the history of MSL, please visit "Against the Tide" on www.podiobooks.com or in the podcast section of iTunes

Eric Lichtblau’s Unpersuasive Defense Of The New York Times’ Failure To Print His Story On The NSA’s Illegal Electronic Spying In October 2004

...The Times plainly failed the duty of the free press...to prevent the people from being sent to die from foreign shot and shell because of governmental misconduct...one is not happy to think that the newspaper that the country depends upon not only bears responsibility for facilitating the launching of the war, but also for facilitating the reelection of the disastrous people who launched and continued that disastrous policy and many others besides...

This is the audio version of Dean Lawrence R. Velvel's blog, www.velvelonnationalaffairs.com
For more information on The Massachusetts School of Law, log on to www.mslaw.edu
And to hear (and see!) the history of MSL, please visit "Against the Tide" on www.podiobooks.com or in the podcast section of iTunes

...Most of the press was nothing but the tool of Chamberlain: it printed what he wanted it to say, did not print what the Government told it not to print, would not print articles or editorials that allegedly might inflame Hitler, in an English reprint of Mein Kampf, left out much -- apparently most -- of the most inflammatory things said by Hitler in that book, refused to say what Hitler was doing to the Jews, and, in general, acted as Chamberlain’s lapdog... Those of us who are Americans old enough to have lived through Viet Nam as adults, and now Iraq, have seen many of the same phenomena at work in the United States...

This is the audio version of Dean Lawrence R. Velvel's blog, www.velvelonnationalaffairs.com
For more information on The Massachusetts School of Law, log on to www.mslaw.edu
And to hear (and see!) the history of MSL, please visit "Against the Tide" on www.podiobooks.com or in the podcast section of iTunes

...one would hope that the continuous scandals over executive misdeeds might cause even right wingers like Roberts, Thomas and Scalia to see the light. One could hope, but one doesn’t expect. ...

This is the audio version of Dean Lawrence R. Velvel's blog, www.velvelonnationalaffairs.com
For more information on The Massachusetts School of Law, log on to www.mslaw.edu
And to hear (and see!) the history of MSL, please visit "Against the Tide" on www.podiobooks.com or in the podcast section of iTunes

...Congress enacts laws that most or even all legislators have not read, that Congresspeople and their staffs did not write (the laws were written by the executive or by private lobbyists), that have sometimes been procedurally manipulated in Congress so that legislators will not even have a chance to read them, let alone absorb and consider what they say. The Patriot Act exemplified this..

This is the audio version of Dean Lawrence R. Velvel's blog, www.velvelonnationalaffairs.com
For more information on The Massachusetts School of Law, log on to www.mslaw.edu
And to hear (and see!) the history of MSL, please visit "Against the Tide" on www.podiobooks.com or in the podcast section of iTunes

....The real truth is that torture was ordered from the top and the torture memos were meant to give legal cover to -- were meant to preclude criminal actions against -- the Bushes, Cheneys, Rices, Tenets, Rumsfelds, Ashcrofts, Addingtons, Haynes and Feiths who were committing serious crimes that could be punished by execution.... American officials have committed moral treason, if not legal treason. Legally, they are certainly guilty of crimes so serious that execution is a possible penalty...

This is the audio version of Dean Lawrence R. Velvel's blog, www.velvelonnationalaffairs.com
For more information on The Massachusetts School of Law, log on to www.mslaw.edu
And to hear (and see!) the history of MSL, please visit "Against the Tide" on www.podiobooks.com or in the podcast section of iTunes

... One of the reasons supposedly charitable, supposedly nonprofit hospitals are amassing huge sums and paying CEOs amounts of compensation like three, four or five million per year or even more, is that the hospitals receive tax exemptions because they are providing charitable care -- free care or deeply discounted care -- for those who can’t pay. The problem, though, is that there’re not providing very much charitable care...But the percentage of charitable care Northwestern provides -- are you ready for this -- is “less than 2% of its revenues".,,

This is the audio version of Dean Lawrence R. Velvel's blog, www.velvelonnationalaffairs.com
For more information on The Massachusetts School of Law, log on to www.mslaw.edu
And to hear (and see!) the history of MSL, please visit "Against the Tide" on www.podiobooks.com or in the podcast section of iTunes

But when Michelle Obama -- who, as an African American, has even more to be angry about than even the Jews of my generation -- uttered this truth by saying that her husband’s candidacy and its reception were the first time she had ever been proud of America, she caught hell in the media and elsewhere.... Michelle Obama’s problem is that she told it straight, told it as she feels about it, as she feels about it with much justification. America’s problem is that it does not want to discuss whether there is truth in what someone says, but instead wants to hear only bullshit that makes people thoughtlessly think well of what we do. Well, I say good for Michelle Obama.

This is the audio version of Dean Lawrence R. Velvel's blog, www.velvelonnationalaffairs.com
For more information on The Massachusetts School of Law, log on to www.mslaw.edu
And to hear (and see!) the history of MSL, please visit "Against the Tide" on www.podiobooks.com or in the podcast section of iTunes

...This is a country which perpetrates, condones, and/or ignores the most awful conduct. We are fighting wars and killing people by the gross, but nobody with power gives enough of a damn to put an end to it... it is sometimes claimed the public cares less and less, and even left wingers profess that we cannot leave Iraq lest matters get worse ... The Republican candidate, McCain, would continue fighting for a hundred years -- of him it was recently said he never saw a country he did not want to bomb or invade, and that (being third generation Navy) he thinks war the natural state of affairs -- as, evilly, do so many of my generation. Nor do many stop to realize that war, about which people care so little because it is not them that go to it, contributes mightily to the horrendous economic situation that it is said they do care about...

This is the audio version of Dean Lawrence R. Velvel's blog, www.velvelonnationalaffairs.com
For more information on The Massachusetts School of Law, log on to www.mslaw.edu
And to hear (and see!) the history of MSL, please visit "Against the Tide" on www.podiobooks.com or in the podcast section of iTunes