College Board bars AP Government from teaching US Constitution, US wars

The Examiner
Carl Herman

I have been removed from the Advanced Placement (AP) Government listserve for documenting US Constitution promises compared with these recent US ‘laws’ and actions:

• assassination of Americans upon the non-reviewable dictate of the president,
  
  
• control-drown/waterboarding anyone dictated as a “terrorist” despite all US and international case law finding this to be torture,
  
  
• NDAA 2012 and 2006 Military Commissions Act that state a president can dictate any person as a “terrorist suspect,” and then disappear them without challenge,
  
  
• presidential executive order saying the US government can seize any resource, any person, at any time for “national defense.”
  
  
• US wars and armed attacks that violate treaties after both world wars that make use of military unlawful unless a country’s government attacks first (Kellogg-Briand and UN Charter).

There are ~ 2,000 AP Government teachers worldwide; my communications via the listserve documented these important policies that was news to many who only look to corporate media (who also publish our texts). With these communications to teaching colleagues, I used my “academic voice” rather than the “civic voice” I use as a writer. The difference is my academic voice stays to the law and facts without my interpretation and policy position.

I was informed by the listserve moderator that a Bill Tinkler of the College Board had deemed these posts “non-academic,” of “personal nature,” and “unsuitable” for consideration of teachers in a college-level course on government.

Mr. Tinkler ordered the moderator to remove me from the listserve.

Mr. Tinkler never communicated with me to ask any question or state any argument.

I assume that such action would apply to any teacher who juxtaposed the US Constitution with US policies and wars. Therefore, I’m taking Mr. Tinkler’s initial indirect communication with me to voice the College Board’s opposition to AP Government classes teaching the US Constitution as applied to our most important current events. I welcome Mr. Tinkler’s clarification.

I e-mailed our moderator that:

1. Bill Tinkler will have opportunity to explain his position and cite the evidence.
   
2. If Mr. Tinkler cannot support his censorship, he will reinstate me and I'll post to our 2,000 teachers the professional academic standards of refutation for factual claims. If he can support his censorship, I'd be happy to correct my behavior both to the listserve and to the public audience of up to two million views a month.
   
3. Mr. Tinkler will have two choices: either academic professionalism, or my  ongoing public voice of my findings of AP Government leadership.

I invited our moderator to join my voice of obvious US War Crimes and destruction of the US Constitution, and to help our colleagues overcome cognitive dissonance.
I promise to write with Mr. Tinkler’s response.

Waging War against Iran is a Criminal Act, in Violation of International Law The death toll from World War III will be incalculable...

Global Research
Prof. Francis A. Boyle

Article 2 (3) of the United Nations Charter requires the pacific settlement of the international dispute between the United States and Iran. To the same effect is article 33 and the entirety of Chapter VI of the United Nations Charter that mandate and set up numerous procedures for the pacific settlement of the international dispute between the United States and Iran. And of course Article 2(4) of the U.N. Charter prohibits both the threat and use of force by the United States against Iran.

Furthermore, both Iran and the United States are parties to the Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact of 1928, upon which legal basis the Nazi Leaders were prosecuted by the United States, inter alia, at Nuremberg for Crimes against Peace, sentenced to death, and executed. In Article I thereof the States Parties “condemn recourse to war for the solution of international controversies, and renounce it, as an instrument of national policy in their relations with one another." The United States has been illegally threatening war against Iran going back to the Bush Jr. Administration. Article II requires the United States only to pursue a pacific settlement of its international dispute with Iran: “The High Contracting Parties agree that the settlement or solution of all disputes or conflicts of whatever nature or of whatever origin they may be, which may arise among them, shall never be sought except by pacific means.”

Finally, both the United States and Iran are parties to the 1899 Hague Convention for the Pacific Settlement of International Disputes. This seminal Hague Peace Convention establishes numerous mechanisms for the pacific settlement of international disputes between contracting parties that are too numerous to analyze here. But they are discussed in detail in my book Foundations of World Order (Duke University Press: 1999). According to article 27 thereof, if a serious dispute threatens to break out between contracting powers, it was the DUTY of the other contracting powers to remind them that the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague is open to them, and such reminder could not be treated as an unfriendly act of intervention by the disputants. Today the world needs one State party to either the 1899 Hague Convention for the Pacific Settlement of International Disputes or the 1907 Hague Convention for the Pacific Settlement of International Disputes to publicly remind both the United States and Iran that the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague, together with its International Bureau and the entirety of the 1899 Hague Convention for the Pacific Settlement of International Disputes , are available to the two States in order to resolve their dispute in a peaceful manner.

After the terrorist assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand in Sarajevo in June of 1914, Serbia made an offer to Austria to submit the entire dispute to “the International Tribunal of The Hague”—i.e.,to the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague. Austria did not accept the offer, the First World War broke out, and about 10 Million Human Beings were needlessly slaughtered.

The death toll from World War III will be incalculable. Humanity must not allow our history to repeat itself! Otherwise, that could be the end of our Humanity.


Francis A. Boyle is Professor of International Law 

Fahrenheit 11/11/11

Global Research
David Swanson

Believe it or not, November 11th was not made a holiday in order to celebrate war, support troops, or cheer the 11th year of occupying Afghanistan.  This day was made a holiday in order to celebrate an armistice that ended what was up until that point, in 1918, one of the worst things our species had thus far done to itself, namely World War I.

World War I, then known simply as the world war or the great war, had been marketed as a war to end war.  Celebrating its end was also understood as celebrating the end of all wars.  A ten-year campaign was launched in 1918 that in 1928 created the Kellogg-Briand Pact, legally banning all wars.  That treaty is still on the books, which is why war making is a criminal act and how Nazis came to be prosecuted for it.

    "[O]n November 11, 1918, there ended the most unnecessary, the most financially exhausting, and the most terribly fatal of all the wars that the world has ever known. Twenty millions of men and women, in that war, were killed outright, or died later from wounds. The Spanish influenza, admittedly caused by the War and nothing else, killed, in various lands, one hundred million persons more." -- Thomas Hall Shastid, 1927.

According to U.S. Socialist Victor Berger, all the United States had gained from participation in World War I was the flu and prohibition. It was not an uncommon view. Millions of Americans who had supported World War I came, during the years following its completion on November 11, 1918, to reject the idea that anything could ever be gained through warfare.

Sherwood Eddy, who coauthored "The Abolition of War" in 1924, wrote that he had been an early and enthusiastic supporter of U.S. entry into World War I and had abhorred pacifism. He had viewed the war as a religious crusade and had been reassured by the fact that the United States entered the war on a Good Friday. At the war front, as the battles raged, Eddy writes, "we told the soldiers that if they would win we would give them a new world."

Eddy seems, in a typical manner, to have come to believe his own propaganda and to have resolved to make good on the promise. "But I can remember," he writes, "that even during the war I began to be troubled by grave doubts and misgivings of conscience." It took him 10 years to arrive at the position of complete Outlawry, that is to say, of wanting to legally outlaw all war. By 1924 Eddy believed that the campaign for Outlawry amounted, for him, to a noble and glorious cause worthy of sacrifice, or what U.S. philosopher William James had called "the moral equivalent of war." Eddy now argued that war was "unchristian." Many came to share that view who a decade earlier had believed Christianity required war. A major factor in this shift was direct experience with the hell of modern warfare, an experience captured for us by the British poet Wilfred Owen in these famous lines:

    If in some smothering dreams you too could pace

    Behind the wagon that we flung him in,

    And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,

    His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;

    If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

    Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,

    Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud

    Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,

    My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

    To children ardent for some desperate glory,

    The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est

    Pro patria mori.

The propaganda machinery invented by President Woodrow Wilson and his Committee on Public Information had drawn Americans into the war with exaggerated and fictional tales of German atrocities in Belgium, posters depicting Jesus Christ in khaki sighting down a gun barrel, and promises of selfless devotion to making the world safe for democracy. The extent of the casualties was hidden from the public as much as possible during the course of the war, but by the time it was over many had learned something of war's reality. And many had come to resent the manipulation of noble emotions that had pulled an independent nation into overseas barbarity.