Category: War crimes etc

Further to this recent JWN post on JFDZ’s, today I found a really excellent report that Human Rights First issued in June on the topic.
So far I’ve only been able to read the report’s well-argued Introduction. It notes that the existence of JFDZ’s at Gitmo and Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan is well known…

Nonetheless, there is still no or only conflicting information about how many individuals are held there, troubling information about inadequate provision of notice to families about the fact of detainees

Today (Monday) the NYT ran the
second of the two excellent pieces in which Tim Golden has been tracking
the evolution of the Bush administration’s policies regarding “enemy combatants”.
Today’s looks in particular at the history of the whole Guantanamo
detention operation, and the series of maneuvers and infighting that have
gone on inside the Bush administration regarding that hell-hole.

I think that all of us in the human rights community should make a huge push–regardless
of who wins the election November 2– to have that whole sorry place of infamy
completely dismantled.

In addition, we should seek
an immediate end to all the other law-breaking moves the administration
has made to create “jurisdiction-free detention zones” in which US government
officials and contractors can interrogate, abuse, and torture detainees at
will.

Where there is no clear jurisdiction, how can there be justice? How
much longer can we let this situation continue?

It’s not just Gitmo, that’s for sure. We’ve learned recently about
the continuation of the practice of shuffling “ghost detainees” around the
world–including out of Iraq, where the administration doesn’t even contest
the applicability of the Geneva Conventions.

The administration has used two mechanisms to keep people whom US forces
have detained, and whom it wants to forcefully interrogate, away from any
protections under either the US civil code or the US military code. One
is to create its own “jurisdiction-free detention zones”– whether at Gitmo,
or aboard various US Navy vessels or in various other US Navy facilities
around the world, or on the territory of pliant other governments. The other
is the policy of “rendering” these detainees to pliant other governments
who essentially do the torturing for them, often under the supervision of
or with the active help of US interrogators.

(Outsourcing torture is another way of describing this. Also, I hate
the use of the term “rendering” in that context: one much more long-established
meaning of it that pertains to flesh is when you boil down the bones and
offal of an animal to make glue and other by-products of butchery….)

And just let me note–again–the irony of the fact that Saddam Hussein is
sitting near Baghdad being accorded the full protections of the Geneva Conventions
in the course of his detention, while some of his far less culpable countrymen
have been spirited out of the country in clear contravention of the Geneva
Conventionsd, and shipped to JFDZs elsewhere for the “full (ill-)treatment”.

So anyway, now I’ve provided a little broad context for the whole Guantanamo
operation, let’s look at some of the main things Tim Golden was writing today.

Continue reading “Jurisdiction-free detention zones: end them!”

… the International Criminal Court???
Back on July 1, 2002, the historic Rome Treaty came into force, and the ICC– dream of so many in the international human rights movement– was finally up and running.
But to where, exactly?
I just went over to the ICC’s website to update myself on what this much-lauded institution has been doing for the past two years… And the answer is–
Not very much of anything at all.
In the past year, the ICC seems to have issued a total of eight press releases! (None since April 20.)
Though it’s a new-age international institution and has been in existence for more than two years already, its web-page on its own budgetary affairs gives us zero details on what it’s budget is, how it acquired its funding, or what it spent it on.
Yes, but what of the content of those eight press releases, you ask? Isn’t ICC prescutor Luis Moreno Campo busy using the organization’s budget to launch investigations into atrocities all over the world??
Back in July 2003, Moreno issued a breathless press release to the waiting media, explaining that … he could not start an investigation into anything to do with the US’s launch of a gratuitous war against Iraq because, although the Rome Treaty allows for ICC prosecutions in cases of “Crimes of Aggression” the nature of those crimes has not yet been decided. Oh, also, neither the US nor Iraqi is a State Party to the Treaty.
Ah, but he did promise he’d be “closely following” the tragic situation in Ituri, in eastern Congo. Indeed, he promised that, “If necessary, the Office of the Prosecutor will seek authorisation from a Pre-Trial Chamber to start an investigation.” (An “investigation” is a much more formal thing than “closely following”.)
Since then– nothing more about Ituri.
Then, in late February 2004, we had this from Moreno, promising that he would investigate,

the crimes committed on Saturday 21 February 2004 in Barlonya camp, North Eastern Uganda. The latest reports estimate the number of deaths at over 200… These crimes could fall under the jurisdiction of the ICC…

Since when– again, no further news on Barlonya. And nothing, nothing at all on any of the other regions of the world–Darfur, Nepal, etc etc– where major atrocities continue to be committed.
Look, I don’t want to criticize Mr. Moreno personally. But I do think that for a huge number of reasons the ICC has turned out to be an extremely disappointing body.
Perhaps this was an inevitable outcome, given the hostility shown towards it by not only the US but also Russia, China, and India, among the world’s great powers?
No, I think the problem’s a bit deeper than that…

Continue reading “Whatever became of– ?”

There were two piece in today’s Iraqi Press Monitor related to the plans to try Saddam Hussein.
One, from the independent daily Al-Sabah said this:

“Iraq for All” news network was informed that the Cabinet has decided to dismiss Salim al-Chalabi, the man chose to chair the special court to try Saddam Hussein. The decision results from demands to move Saddam’s trial out of Iraq, which Chalabi opposed. An arrest warrant was recently issued for Chalabi…

That sounded pretty intriguing. Chalabi opposed moving the trial outside of Iraq? Has that possibility really been discussed, I wonder? Or was it some kind of a bungled rendering of the idea of “extending the purview of the trial beyond acts committed inside Iraq” that the report was referring to, instead?
That might have been what the discussion was about–given the other recent news that the Iraqis have been trying to urge Iran not to press its own strong case against Saddam for war crimes–and also, given the degree of Iraqi-nationalist opposition to the idea of including the Kuwaitis’ claims against him on the charge-sheet.
The other IPM piece related to an article in yesterday’s al-Sharq al-Awsat, a pan-Arab daily published in London. Since this paper has a good online edition, I was able to go over to the original article there to read it. (Which also let me get a bead on the accuracy of IPM’s highly abbreviated rendering of it in English: fairly good, I would say, but still some room for improvement…)
Anyway, here’s what IPM said:

Continue reading “Trial news: Saddam & Slobo”

There’s lots happening in the United States’ global detentions gulag. I haven’t had a chance to blog about the Fay/Jones report yet. But there are some under-reported things that have been happening in the important Gitmo branch of the gulag that I want to note.
The “Military Commissions” (quasi-‘trials’) that will make a final disposition on the cases brought before them have finally–more than 30 months into the detention of most of the prisoners in Gitmo–begun this week.
Human Rights Watch’s website has a good page that explains the difference between the “military commissions” and the other two types of quasi-judicial hearing that are now–slowly–happening on Gitmo.
So this week, the first detainees–oops, sorry, make that ‘defendants’; or, on the other hand, maybe not?– have had “their day in court” in the military commission hearing room. It has not so far been an easy week for the people running the commission.
Deborah Pearlstein of Human Rights First has been observing the proceedings, and HRF has been running her very informative, blog-type journal of what she’s been seeing there. (She’s been running one or two days behind. I sympathize with her. Still, it’s well done and certainly worth reading.)
First up Tuesday was Yemeni national Salim Ahmed Hamdan…

Continue reading “News from the gulag: Gitmo branch”

I hadn’t seen this interesting story before. It’s on Reuters Alertnet today, and it tells how Foreign Minister Jose Ramos-Horta of East Timor has urged his country’s friends in the international community to stop pushing for a UN court to be established to try the many terrible excesses that Indonesia committed in the country in the wake of its 1999 election:

Foreign Minister Jose Ramos-Horta said his tiny nation was heavily dependent on political stability in neighbouring Indonesia and a U.N. court trying Indonesian soldiers could spark a backlash and even be a setback for the war on terror.
“The government of East Timor does not contemplate lobbying for an international tribunal to try the crimes of 1999 because we know this would undermine the existing relations between the two countries,” Ramos-Horta told Reuters by telephone from Dili.
“We know it could be manipulated by certain elements in Indonesia itself and create a backlash against the United Nations and the international community, even against the government of the day in Indonesia,” he said.

Human Rights Watch reportedly called, over the weekend, for the establishment of just such a UN court. That happened after a national-level Indonesian appeals court overturned the convictions of three top soldiers and a policeman found guilty of crimes against humanity in connection with the 1999 massacres.
Indonesia is also, right now, in the middle of a complex presidential election. Presumably, the fear is that if the UN were to announce plans for a court, that could push more voptes to the pro-military, ultra-nationalistic party, Golkar.
The Reuters piece added:

Continue reading “East Timor resists push for UN court”

I just finished writing another chapter of my book on Africa. Doing so involved –among other things–poring over the reports of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, in order to see how those good folks tried to comprehend and describe the violence that beset their land in the apartheid era.
In volume 6 there (one of the “codicil” volumes, published in 2001), I found the following very important quote:

A state must be held to a higher standard of moral and political conduct than any other role player in a violent conflict. After all, a state has at its command powers, resources, privileges, obligations and responsibilities that liberation movements and other role players do not.(p.615)

I think that that simple piece of wisdom should be underscored in the present time, particularly in the context of the US’s conduct in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere; Israel’s conduct in the occupied territories; and Sudan’s conduct in Darfur. (To name just a few.)
The sentiment expressed there is pure John Locke. Locke, a 17th-century british philosopher, had a vivid understanding of (and as a result, a healthy distrust of) the huge power of states relative to that of non-state actors.
I was thumbing through my copy of Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, trying to find one or two of the more apposite quotes in that regard. Well, the book fell open instead at Chapter XVI, “Of Conquest”. It is worth re-reading– and particuarly so, perhaps, by all those in the US rightwing who have a healthy–one might say, Lockean–distrust of “big” government:

Sec. 175. THOUGH governments can originally have no other rise than that before mentioned, nor polities be founded on any thing but the consent of the people; yet such have been the disorders ambition has filled the world with, that in the noise of war, which makes so great a part of the history of mankind, this consent is little taken notice of: and therefore many have mistaken the force of arms for the consent of the people, and reckon conquest as one of the originals of government. But conquest is as far from setting up any government, as demolishing an house is from building a new one in the place. Indeed, it often makes way for a new frame of a common-wealth, by destroying the former; but, without the consent of the people, can never erect a new one.

Continue reading “Responsibilities of states in conflicts”

The Appeals Chamber of the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia (ICTY) has rapped one of the court’s main Trial Chambers sharply over the knuckles by overturning 16 of the 19 counts of the Trial Chamber’s earlier conviction of Croatian General Tihomir Blaskic.
July 29, the Appeals Chamber rendered these findings, and reduced Blaskic’s sentence from 45 years to nine years. Since Blaskic has already served eight years and four months, and has been what the court described as a “model prisoner”, he was later in the day released.
The summary that the Appeals Chamber issued of its finding makes clear its view that the Trial Chamber had committed several significant errors of law as well as errors of fact in reaching its earlier judgment. Regarding “fact”, in the four years since the Trial Chamber reached its judgment, substantial new evidence has come to light that has tended to exonerate Blaskic. But the Appeals Chamber made clear that on each of the T.C.’s earlier judgments it had considered errors of law before it even started considering errors of fact; and where the errors of law were on their own substantial enough to lead to overturning the T.C.’s judgment, then the A.C. did not even consider the issues of fact.
It is evidently a good thing, from the rule-of-law viewpoint, that defendants at the international criminal tribunals have access to a well-constituted appeals procedure. However, the fact that the Appeals Chamber can overturn so many of the T.C.’s judgments merely on matters of law, rather than on matters of (newly adduced) fact seems to me fairly troubling. It would be great if the judges at the two different levels could get their acts a bit better together regarding what constitutes sound legal argument on all or most of these cases. And then, just consider what this whole process must have cost: the process of trying Blaskic on all these 19 counts, and then the subsequent process of overturning 16 of those convictions….

Continue reading “Hague court Appeals Chamber releases Blaskic”

If you’re someone who does really bad torture, then there are times when you just can’t let the “evidence” of what you have done to another human being survive–evidence, that is, in the form of a surviving person who can ‘tell’ others what happened to her/him, either verbally or through bodily ‘inscriptions’.
So what do you do?
I’ve been reading the Report that South Africa’s TRC presented to the government back in 1998. In Volume 2 there’s a whole grisly section on the exhumations that the TRC undertook in 1997 of prisoners tortured to death by the apartheid regime.
For example, the first one was of the body of Phila Portia Ndwandwe, an ANC fighter of unknown age… In its dry way, the report says (p.545):

Durban Security Branch members abducted her from Swaziland [in 1988]. She was not prepared to co-operate with the police. They state that they did not have admissible evidence to prosecute here and that they could not release her, so they killed her and buried her on the Elandskop farm.

One of the TRC Commissioners noted that the people who killed her said she had been held naked and interrogated in a small concrete chamber near the burial place, for some time before her death. Then:

When we exhumed her, she was on her back in a foetal position… and had a single bullet wound to the top of her head, indicating that she had been kneeling or squatting when she was killed. Her pelvis was clothed in a plastic packet, fashioned into a pair of panties indicating an attempt to protect her modesty.

Aaaah, I won’t go on. Page after page of it.
In most of those cases, the “goal” of the torturing had been either (1) to get information or (2) to “turn” the victim so he or she would become a double-agent for the benefit of the apartheid regime.
And in Abu Ghraib…

Continue reading “Disposing of torture victims”

Ana Uzelac of the Inst. for War & Peace Reporting had a good piece in their 9 July collection of stories about Slobo’s trial in The Hague. She was exploring the whole issue of him being declared “fit” or “unfit” to stand trial, and what the court’s options are.
It turns out that, contrary to what I wrote here last week, Slobo was not declared (globally) “unfit to stand trial”, which is sort of a different proceeding. What Judge Patrick Robinson did July 5 was merely postpone the trial, pending the defendant gaining the strength needed to proceed with his own defense… And that was done again, July 12.
If he is declared more generally “unfit” to stand trial, then the court has various options. According to Uzelac, what the judges ruled last week was that:

Continue reading “Slobo: ‘fit’ to be tried, contd…”