Lawrence Velvel, Dean and co-founder of the Massachusetts School of Law at Andover hopes to see the prosecution of President George Bush and the “Bush Crime Family” for war crimes, even going as far as stating that, if found guilty, the officials should be hanged.

Velvel has already made international headlines with his intentions to hold a two-day conference titled “Planning for the Prosecution of High Level American War Criminals,“at the law school, September 13th & 14^th. The purpose of the conference is to begin planning the case against President George W. Bush and others within his administration.

“This is not intended to be a mere discussion of violations of law that have occurred,” said Dean Velvel, ”It is, rather, intended to be a planning conference at which plans will be laid and necessary organizational structures set up, to pursue the guilty as long as necessary and, if need be, to the ends of the Earth.”

“We must try to hold Bush administration leaders accountable in courts of justice,” Velvel said. “And we must insist on appropriate punishments, including, if guilt is found, the hangings visited upon top German and Japanese war-criminals in the 1940s.”

Velvel said past practice has been to allow U.S. officials responsible for war crimes in Viet Nam and elsewhere to enjoy immunity from prosecution upon leaving office. “President Johnson retired to his Texas ranch and his Defense Secretary Robert McNamara was named to head the World Bank; Richard Nixon retired to San Clemente and his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was allowed to grow richer and richer,” Velvel said.

“For George Bush, Richard Cheney, Don Rumsfeld and Henry Kissinger to swing, or even for them to spend years in jail, would be a powerful lesson to future American leaders,” Velvel writes in the statement outlining his conference. ”The conference will take up such issues as the nature of domestic and international crimes committed; which high-level Bush officials, including Federal judges and Members of Congress, are chargeable with war crimes; which foreign and domestic tribunals can be used to prosecute them; and the setting up of an umbrella coordinating committee with representatives of legal groups concerned about the war crimes such as the Center for Constitutional Rights, ACLU,  among others.

The response from Velvel’s announcement of the conference has been “overwhelmingly favorable,” though the reactions of some Andover residents and Massachusetts School of Law graduates were marked with disbelief. One graduate stated, I think the board of directors should convene an immediate meeting,…it cheapens my degree, quite frankly.”