Category: War crimes etc

I was glad to see that Jonathan Tepperman, an editor at Foreign
Affairs, raised the important issue of command responsibility
regarding the tortures and other abuses in the US global gulag, in an

op-ed piece
he had in the NYT Thursday. Certainly, the fact that–according
to the news that has come out this week–Donald Rumsfeld and high-ranking
people in the White House Counsel’s office and the Vice-President’s office
all took active parts in the discussions around the legality of the extremely
abusive techniques used within the gulag brings the question of command
responsibility front and center.

As Tepperman sums it up,

Under the doctrine of command responsibility, officials can be
held accountable for war crimes committed by their subordinates even if
they did not order them– so long as they had control over the perpetrators,
had reason to know about the crimes, and did not stop them or punish the
criminals.

This doctrine has been well accepted into US domestic law, most notably
in the Supreme Court’s ruling in the case of General Yamashita, the
man who had been the Japanese commander of the Philippines during the chaotic
days when his forces’ positions there were collapsing to the Americans.

Indeed, the Supreme Court’s ruling ascribed to a commander an even
broader epistemic responsibility than Tepperman indicates. It is
not just that the commander “has reason to know about the crimes”, but rather
that a commander has an active responsibility to know about, and
to try to stop and punish, crimes of this severity.

Many of the Japanese units in the Philippines did, undisputedly, commit
atrocities during the period in question. Yamashita was captured by the
US forces, and was later charged with responsibility for those war crimes.
As described in a well-compiled little
paper
written by Marine Corps lawyer Maj. Bruce Landrum:

Continue reading “Rumsfeld, Bush, and ‘command responsibility’”

Six days ago, I argued in my column in The Christian Science Monitor
that if torture in US-run detention facilities around the world is to be
stopped, then we need top-level leadership from President Bush that articulates
and then verifiably implements a stance of “zero tolerance for torture.”

My fear was that without such clear and unambiguous leadership, tortures
and abuses of various forms would continue to be perpetrated by lower-level
US government personnel and contractors. I knew that in matters like
this one, clear and forceful leadership counts.

Little did I suspect that there has indeed been high- and perhaps even
top-level leadership on this issue–but in completely the wrong direction.
Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal published a piece by Jess
Bravin describing a “draft” memo of March 6, 2003 that she had seen in which
advisers to Defense Secretary Rumsfeld marshalled the arguments as to why
employees in U.S.-run facilities could indeed be justified in the use
of torture.

And the story has only snowballed further since then.

The main argument presented in the March 2003 memo seemed to be a version of the hoary old
defense that “I was just following orders”. (Never mind that that
defense actually had its validity completely skewered in the fourth of the “Nuremberg
Principles”* that were compiled in 1950 on the basis of the Nuremberg court’s judgments.) What
the authors of the March 2003 memo were arguing was essentially that if
government agents felt they needed to use torture they could invoke the
“only following orders” defense, and then that the President’s unbounded
powers to do whatever he wants in war-time could cover them with the grace
of the Prez’s own impunity.

Welcome to the view of the world as enunciated by the courtiers of His
Most Sublime Excellency the Lord of all World Known and Unkown (and the
Unknown Unknowns), the Defender of all that is Gracious, George Bush II.

Bravin wrote about the memo that it:

Continue reading “Yes, on torture, leadership counts”

You want more clues as to how widespread physical abuse is in US-run detention facilities? Read about Specialist Sean Baker.
Baker was a member of a military-police unit in the Kentucky National Guard who pulled a tour of guard duty at Gitmo. One day in January 2003, an officer ordered Baker to play the role of a balky detainee in a training exercise. He put that dehumanizing orange jumpsuit on over his unifrm and cowered, as ordered, under a bed in a mock ‘cell’.
According to this report by the NYT’s Nick Kristof, this is what Baker said happened next:

“They grabbed my arms, my legs, twisted me up and unfortunately one of the individuals got up on my back from behind and put pressure down on me while I was face down. Then he — the same individual — reached around and began to choke me and press my head down against the steel floor. After several seconds, 20 to 30 seconds, it seemed like an eternity because I couldn’t breathe. When I couldn’t breathe, I began to panic and I gave the code word I was supposed to give to stop the exercise, which was `red.’ . . . That individual slammed my head against the floor and continued to choke me. Somehow I got enough air. I muttered out: `I’m a U.S. soldier. I’m a U.S. soldier.’ ”
Then [continues Kristof] the soldiers noticed that he was wearing a U.S. battle dress uniform under the jumpsuit. Mr. Baker was taken to a military hospital for treatment of his head injuries, then flown to a Navy hospital in Portsmouth, Va. After a six-day hospitalization there, he was given a two-week discharge to rest.
But Mr. Baker began suffering seizures, so the military sent him to the Walter Reed Army Medical Center for treatment of a traumatic brain injury. He stayed at the hospital for 48 days, was transferred to light duty… and was finally given a medical discharge two months ago.
Meanwhile, a military investigation concluded that there had been no misconduct involved in Mr. Baker’s injury. Hmm. The military also says it can’t find a videotape that is believed to have been made of the incident.
Most appalling, when Mr. Baker told his story to a Kentucky reporter, the military lied in a disgraceful effort to undermine his credibility.

Continue reading “How to train abusers”

I am so glad the the NYT has started to try to be a real newspaper and is–at last– doing some things that look like serious investigative reporting.
One recent product of this is this story by Steven Lee Myers in today’s paper. It’s titled: “Military Completed Death Certificates for 20 Prisoners Only After Months Passed”. This refers to the fact that of the 37 deaths of foreign citizens in the US military’s global gulag that have been reported since –it seems–December 2002, 20 of them had no death certificates issued until very recently.
At that point, I assume, after the breaking of the Abu Ghraib scandal, people in the military hierarchy started to realize that that just maybe, that many unreported deaths might look a little fishy?
Well, at least 17 of the deaths that have now –however belatedly–had certificates issued look very fishy anyway. These are all but one of the deaths briefly described in the table accompanying the article. The one exception there was one, in Mosul in december 2003, in which the death certificate explicitly stated, “No signs of abuse or foul play”. Many others showed extreme signs of foul play (see below).
The caption to this table says it doesn’t include “13 deaths attributed to natural causes.” 18 + 13 = 31. So that makes 6 more deaths we need to know more about?
This is what I learned from looking at the table there:

Continue reading “Deaths of U.S.-held detainees”

My “day job” these days– when I’m not posting stuff on the blog, tending my garden, or doing all the other things that can handily distract me from it– is to write up all the material I’ve been gathering over the past 42 months on “How societies deal with legacies of atrocious violence.” This will be a book, once I’ve wrestled all my material into shape.
These days I’m working on the chapters on Rwanda. Finding the best words to convey the horror of what happened during the genocide there–and especially the enthusiastic, public, and mass-participatory aspect of it– is hard enough. Finding words that work toward providing an explanation of that is even harder.
This weekend, I’m going to what looks like a really timely conference in London, Ontario, titled “Why neighbours kill”. (Note the Canadian spelling there.) They even have a website for the conference. I think I’m supposed to talk about Rwanda, with an emphasis on implications for post-genocide policies. Preventing iterations of violence/atrocity is the big concern of my book. However, as I think about the conference I’ve also been thinking about another situation of prolonged, genocidal or near-genocidal violence among neighbors with which I’m even more intimately familiar than the one in Rwanda: that is, the time I spent in Lebanon, 1974-81.
The Lebanese civil war started on April 25, 1975…

Continue reading “Neighbo(u)rs killing neighbo(u)rs”

In an interview May 22 , 2004, Harvard law prof Alan Dershowitz, a one-time liberal who has become a leading apologist for the use of torture in the war against terrorism, crowed that “Americans” had come to share his point of view:
Asked if he thought Americans were ready to “do what it takes” to get information from terrorists who threaten American lives, Dershowitz [said]: “I think so. But I think Americans want us to do it smarter, want us to do it better…”
Not so fast, big guy! The American people are actually a lot smarter, or let’s say wiser*, than you give them credit for! And certainly a lot wiser than you are… A WaPo/ABC News poll published today reveals that 63 percent of Americans say they think the use of torture is “never acceptable”.
More than half, 52 percent, also say the use of “physical abuse but not torture” is never acceptable.
This whole poll has produced results that are pretty encouraging for those of us who want to persuade the US government to adopt a policy of zero tolerance for torture. Because of that, I tabulated all the results that the WaPo website gave on various different web-pages into one simple table.
You can find the table here. Feel free to use it, but a little attribution for my work in tabulating the data would be nice…
——
* For my discussion of why it is that respecting the Geneva Conventions–on banning torture as well as on other things–is not only the “right” thing to do but also the “smart” thing to do, check out this May 12 post on JWN. Especially the end part of it.

What is the main reason why we need to press President Bush to make an unequivocal
and verifiable commitment to ending the US government’s use and toleration
of torture?

Because any hint at all from the highest echelons of government that this
kind of deeply abusive behavior is ever acceptable at all is a slippery
slope down which it is all too easy for a government, its employees, and
even a supposedly democratic citizenry to slide.

We now have two prime examples of this slippery slope phenomenon:

(1) In Israel, the legislature specifically allowed for the security
services to apply “moderate physical pressure”, at first in cases where there
was good reason to suspect that a suspect had concrete informatin about a
“ticking time-bomb” just about to explode…

Oops! Down the slippery slope they went!

“Moderate physical pressure” became a use of stress positions, dousing with
cold water, and other means of inflicting pain so harsh that many survivors
have had lasting side-effects. (See, for example,
this
2002 Amnesty International report.)

As for “ticking time bombs”?

Continue reading “Tolerating torture: the slipperiest slope”

Why does it seem that no-one is asking the right question yet:
Has the U.S. government definitively stopped all use of cruel, inhuman, or degrading punishment against people in U.S.-run detention facilities in Iraq and everywhere else around the world?
And then: How can we be certain that that behavior has stopped?
I’m sorry, friends, I know I wrote here about this just two days ago. But until someone can reassure me on the above two points then– given the behavior of many organs of the U.S. government over the past 30-plus months–I am going to have to assume that the torture is continuing.
Maybe not (this week) in Abu Ghraib; but quite likely, in many other places. And maybe next week, back in Abu Ghraib again…
I am going to have to assume that all the “consternation” expressed by various spokesmen for the Bush administration is consternation over the fact that the abusive behavior of U.S. government employees and contractors has been revealed, rather than over the fact of the abusive behavior itself.
No-one in the administration has yet provided any clear-cut declarations at all to the effect that, “From now on the US government and all its employers and contractors will abide completely by the Geneva Conventions and all other relevant international and domestic regulations in its treatment of the detainees under its control.”
That’s the kind of declaration I would look for, as a first step.
Instead, we’ve just had flurries of declarations to the effect that, “Our own investigations into the abuses are thorough and are continuing… The perpetrators were only a few bad apples… But you can just trust us to deal with this whole thing… ”
That is, the same kinds of avowals of good intent, coupled with thinly veiled instructions that everyone else should just butt out of enquiring into this whole business, that you hear from serial abusers in just about any situation of chronic rights abuse.
By the way, yesterday Human Rights Watch put up on their website a good summary of all the “International and U.S. Law Prohibiting Torture and Other Ill-treatment of Persons in Custody”.

Continue reading “So, has the torture stopped yet?”

I have been thinking intensively about the effects the widespread pattern
of tortures in Abu Ghraib and othe parts of the United States’ global gulag
has had on two distinct groups of people: the survivors of those acts, and
the U.S. Army.

But first, a very important but seemingly innocent question to which I have
seen as yet, no clear answer:

Has the practice of administering torture at many locations inside the
U.S. gulag actually been definitively brought to a halt yet?

How would we know that it has? What kind of evidence would it take
for us to convince ourselves and the rest of the world that it has?

I know one thing. The fact that Gen. Geoffrey Miller is still in
charge of the Abu Ghraib branch of the gulag is distinctly not reassuring.
Miller is the Marines General and former commander of the Gitmo branch
of the gulag who was the one who institutionalized the “conditioning”, i.e.
torture, of suspects over at the Abu Ghraib branch back last October.

… And now we’re supposed to believe that this old fox can successfully
be the one to “clean up” the abuses in that hen-house? What do they take
us for– dummies?

Indeed, given (1) the distinct possibility that permission for the “conditioning”
to occur was given at the very highest levels of both the military command
in Iraq the civilian leadership of the Pentagon, and (2) the lengthy record
of these leaderships in trying to sweep all the evidence about the tortures
under the rug for many months till Sy Hersh and Dan Rather forced it into
the open, there is almost nothing that those leaderships by themselves could
do at this point that would provide me with the necessary level of reassurance
that the torture has actually stopped.

Which brings me back to a suggestion I made
here
last June, to the effect that in the case of our earlier, very lively concerns
about Saddam Hussein’s terrible record of rights abuses, people in
the global human rights movements should– in the years before the war–
have been aggreessively promoting the idea of the UN forming a robust, intrusive
‘Human Rights Monitoring, Verification , and Inspection Commission’ to investigate
all the suspected abuses inside the country. You know, a sort of ‘Human
Rights UNMOVIC’ analogous to the WMDs UNMOVIC that governments that had concerns/allegations
about Saddam’s WMDs program were able to form back in the fall of 2002…

Continue reading “Has the torture actually stopped?”

It looks like a good, well-reported copy of Newsweek is about to drop on our doorstep. (Actually, two of them, since for some reason we seem to have two concurrent subscriptions. Sorry about all those trees.)
John Barry and an investigative team have been at work on one large chunk of the brutality in the gulag story. And Michael Isikoff has meanwhile gotten hold of both the Alberto Gonzales memo to W of Januray 25, 2002 urging him to junk the Geneva Conventions with respect to captives taken in Afghanistan, and an (unsuccessful) attempt by Colin Powell, also in memo form, to persuade Gonzo to change his mind.
These memos are now posted on the Newsweek/MSNBC website. Gonzo here and Powell here.
Gonzo was apparently most concerned to protect US intel operatives from any charges they might otherwise be subject to, in US courts, under the 1996 War Crimes Act, which bans any Americans from committing war crimes. (!)

Continue reading “Newsweek revelations”