Just the Maxwell v Trump Exhibits, Please — Orwell, Guyenot, Aaronson, Shulze, Allott
by Mary W Maxwell
My lawsuit, Maxwell v Trump, is at the Appeals Court in Boston. In addition to its main argument about the unconstitutionality of the Iran war, I brought together the work of five scholars as exhibits. It is imperative that Americans right now become aware of, especially Trevor Aaronson’s book, The Terror Factory, in which he shows that so much of the FBI’s reports of terrorist incidents in America is, pardon me, BS.
But please read all five exhibits. I hope the judges take them into consideration.
Exhibit A. George Orwell on The Real Purpose of War
[Within Orwell’s 1984, is a smaller book written by “Emanuel Goldstein.” It contains this]:
“The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labour. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent…. The primary aim of modern warfare is to [avoid] raising the general standard of living. (in accordance with the principles of doublethink, this aim is simultaneously recognized and not recognized by the directing brains of the Inner Party)…
In the early twentieth century, the vision of a future society unbelievably rich, leisured, orderly, and efficient … was part of the consciousness of nearly every literate person…
It was clear to all thinking people that the need for human drudgery, and therefore to a great extent for human inequality, had disappeared. If the machine were used deliberately for that end, hunger, overwork, dirt, … disease could be eliminated within a few generations. …
But it was also clear that an all-round increase in wealth threatened the destruction – indeed, in some sense was the destruction – of a hierarchical society. In a world in which everyone worked short hours, had enough to eat, lived in a house with a bathroom and a refrigerator, and possessed a motor-car or even an aeroplane, the most obvious and perhaps the most important form of inequality would already have disappeared.
If it once became general, wealth would confer no distinction. It was possible, no doubt, to imagine a society in which wealth, in the sense of personal possessions and luxuries, should be evenly distributed, while power remained in the hands of a small privileged caste. The problem was how to keep the wheels of industry turning without increasing the real wealth of the world. Goods must be produced, but they must not be distributed. And in practice the only way of achieving this was by continuous warfare.
Exhibit B. Laurent Guyénot on How Iran War Started
(From Guyénot’s May 19, 2026 article “Deep Trump” at radbodslament.substack.com)
Consider how the decision to bomb Iran was made last February, as explained by the New York Times in an April 7 article…. On February 11, a meeting was held in the White House Situation Room attended by Benjamin Netanyahu, accompanied by Israeli intelligence officers.
Standing before a screen showing Mossad Director David Barnea and Israeli military officials, Netanyahu presented his case for bombing Iran with the aid of a PowerPoint presentation, demonstrating that it would bring down the Iranian regime and thus resolve instantly all the problems in the Middle East in one fell swoop, while making Trump the greatest man in history.
Seated across from him were President Trump, Secretary of War Peter Hegseth, Chief of Staff Dan Caine, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, CIA Director John Ratcliff, Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, as well as Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, unofficial negotiators. After Netanyahu’s presentation, Trump nodded and said, “It sounds good to me.”
The same group met again the next day, without Netanyahu but with Vice President JD Vance, … A final meeting took place on February 26, including a few other people, such as advisor David Warrington, who discussed the legality of such an intervention. Trump concluded the meeting with these words: “I think we need to do it.”
In the meantime, Vance had had several phone conversations with Netanyahu, who was urging him to act quickly. The next day, February 27, Trump sent the following message from Air Force One: “Operation Epic Fury is approved. No aborts. Good luck.”
Exhibit C. Trevor Aaronson on FBI as Terrorism’s Agent Provocateur
(from Aaronson’s 2013 book “Manufactured Terrorism,” lightly edited)
After 9/11, the FBI was tasked with recruiting a great number of informants who could check on the lives of Muslims. As a private researcher I became interested in “Muslim terrorism.” My statistics show that in the ten years following 9/11, the FBI and Department of Justice indicted and convicted more that 150 people via sting operations. If these, the FBI not only led 50 of the terrorist plots but also provided all the necessary weapons, money, and transportation.
The justification? By catching a lone wolf before he strikes, federal law enforcement can take hi off the streets before he meets a real terrorist who can provide him with weapons. However, to this day, no example exists of a lone wolf who, unable by himself to launch an attack, met a terrorist and became operational. Granted, an Afghan-American named Najibullah Zazi, came close to attacking the NY subway in 2009, with a plan to place backpack bombs on crowded trains but he had international connections and the ability to carry out the work on his own.
When Obama became president in 2009 he used many sting operations. In three years, his DoJ prosecuted 75 terrorism sting targets. Obama embraced national security as a tenet of his office. He also engaged US military resources in the ouster of Libya’s Gaddafi, and conducted secret wars in Yemen and Somalia. The FBI has become effective in creating the enemy it is hitting.
If the Fort Dix Five, as the media later dubbed them, were terrorists, they were coerced ones – pushed along by criminals who had personal interests in their prosecution. (I know of a case where the informant got $100,00.) Dritan Duka said that in the aftermath of 9/11, Muslims could be arrested just for talking. Bakalli asked the Duka cousins wat jihad meant. It didn’t mean violence, they told him, it was a personal struggle against oneself and a struggle to lead a good life. Soon, the FBI arrested the 5 men and charged them with attempted murder and conspiracy.
The key to conviction was that the prosecution did not have to prove that the Fort Dix Five would do the murder, just that they talked about it. This is the crime of conspiracy. In closing, US Attorney Fitzpatrick told the jury “We don’t have to prove that they intended to kill.”
This goes against the landmark case Brandenburg v Ohio (1969). Clarence Brandenburg, a Ku Klux Klansman, had given an inflammatory speech in 1964. He was prosecuted under an Ohio law of 1919 that prohibited advocating “unlawful methods of terrorism.” He appealed his conviction to the US Supreme Court where it was overturned – as the government cannot punish speech unless it is intended and likely to result in imminent lawless action.
Mehenna’s case is connected to this. Actually, the way prosecutors got around Brandenburg was by saying that Mehanna’s advocacy of Al Qaeda and violence provided ‘material support” to the terrorist organization which is against one of the new laws.
At his sentencing in 2012, Mehanna addressed US District Judge George A O’Toole, saying that he was the victim of a vengeful prosecution for his refusal to be an FBI informant. “I have spent the majority of four years in a solitary cell, the size of a closet, locked down for 23 hours each day.” Judge O’Toole, unmoved by Mehanna’s statement, sentenced the 29-year-old to seventeen years in prison.
Exhibit D. Terry Shulze on Magna Charta and the Rational Basis Test
(From “Review of Australian Law and Its Decline,” by retired barrister Terry Shulze, at GumshoeNews.com June 19, 2018, lightly edited)
A farmer asked my help as he suffered financially from an Egg Industry Act by New South Wales Parliament. I thus inquired if the law had a rational basis. In the US,an enactment may be invalid if it does not serve a purpose. This is traceable to Heydon’s Case of 1584 in England which searched for “the mischief which the statute was designed to remedy,” i.e., its raison d’etre.
The 1787 case of Bowman v Middleton, was about a 1712 Act of the Assembly which transferred a freehold from to another, without trial or compensation. The Court at page 254.8-held “that the plaintiffs could claim no title under the Act in question, as it was against common right, as well as Magna Charta, to take away the freehold of one man and vest it in another… without compensation, or even a trial by the jury…. That the Act was, therefore, ipso facto, void. That no length of time could give it validity, being originally founded on erroneous principles.”
This ‘rational basis test’ isn’t known by this name in Australia. However, in NSW, the validity of a law can be checked by its accordance with the Colonial Laws Validity Act. I gathered up some early cases, such as MacDonald v Levy (1833). Judge Burton recognized the duty of the judges as the guardians of the rights of the people. At page 49.0 he states,
“I look upon this clause as the great charter of the Colony, and at once yielding to the colonialists all that by the common law, or the liberal, and enlightened, and accumulated wisdom of our ancestors, has been provided for the protection of life, liberty and property, and for regulating the transactions of men with each other. All becomes by virtue of it “the justice and right” which the justices are sworn to do to all the King’s subjects, and is expressly provided in one of the clauses of Magna Charta.”
I (Shulze) found that Judge Wise, in Rusden v Weeks (1861) clearly supports the position of judicial review of legislation of the NSW Parliament:
“…as the supremacy of the law is the characteristic of every constitutional government, it becomes imperative duty of courts of justice, independently of all political considerations, to decide which is the law of the land.”
In general, the early judges (prior to Australia’s 1901 Federation) clearly considered that the people of NSW had fundamental constitutional rights,
that the courts could declare an Act of Parliament void, that the laws of the legislature must be reasonable and not inconsistent with the Constitution and that the fundamental documents, such as the Magna Charta, Bill of Rights and Habeas Corpus Act comprised parts of the Constitution.
However, two things occurred in the latter half of the 19th century in NSW which perverted this thinking. One was a book “The Constitution of the Australian States” by RD Lumb, which said. “No colonial law was to be void on the ground that it was repugnant to the fundamental principles of English Law.”
The other was the reassertion of legal positivism in the form of “Parliamentary sovereignty.” South Australia’s Parliament had written to Queen Victoria, in 1864, bemoaning: “the danger and impolicy of leaving in the hands of the Colonial Judges the power to declare the Acts of this Parliament illegal… We, therefore, trust that Your Majesty will graciously relieve us from further suffering under this enormous evil… that it shall not be competent for any Judge in the Courts of Providence.
(The judges’ reply was “No.”)
I noted works of Sir Edward Coke (1552-1634). He had said, in Dr Bonham’s case “when an Act of Parliament is against common right and reason, or repugnant, … the common law will control it, and adjudge such Act to be void”.
Coke also said, during the drafting of the Petition of Right of 1627, that “sovereign power is no parliamentary word. … Magna Charta is such a fellow that he will have no sovereign.”
Did I win my challenge to the Egg Industry Act? Some say I did, insofar as a back channel to the NSW Parliament alerted someone to my plans and so they got rid of the Act. What’s more, they legislatively offered compensation. The small farmers in the industry couldn’t believe what happened – they were receiving money instead of being harassed. My client received 1.2 million dollars, of which I never saw a penny. (But earlier I was given a frozen turkey and 4 dozen eggs.)
Personally, I think the situation has further declined since 1985. I know not the reason why each judge takes their path regarding the independence of the judiciary, but it does appear from reading the various cases that, if the judiciary has lost its independence, it is a ‘self-inflicted wound’.
Exhibit E. Eutopia: New Philosophy and New Law for a Troubled World
by Cambridge University Professor Philip Allott, 2016
Note: Allott was for 13 years a legal advisor to UK Foreign office, an experience that inspired him to offer a new philosophy for International Law. See his Eutopia. The abstract of Allott’s 2002 book “The Health of Nations: Society and Law Beyond the State” says:
The human world is changing. Old social structures are being overwhelmed by forces of social transformation which are sweeping across political and cultural frontiers. A social animal is becoming the social species. The animal that lives in packs and herds (family, corporation, nation, state) is becoming a member of a human society which is the society of all human beings, the society of all societies.
The age-old problems of social life — religious, philosophical, moral, political, legal, economic — must now be addressed at the level of the whole species, and the level where all cultures and traditions meet and will contribute to an exhilarating and hazardous new form of human self-evolving….There will be new levels of human energy, creativity, intelligence, to serve the highest aspirations and the highest ideals of all humanity. We know that we will be writing a new page in the better story of human self-evolving.
— My full appeals brief is at www.ConstitutionAndTruth/Court