Sweets Of Adversity: Aung San Suu Kyi's Accepts Her Nobel Peace Prize After A Delay Of 21 Years

Daw Aung San Suu Kyi finally was able to accept the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to her in 1991, when she was under house arrest in Myanmar.  Here are some highlights of her speech: 

Absolute peace in our world is an unattainable goal. But it is one towards which we must continue to journey, our eyes fixed on it as a traveler in a desert fixes his eyes on the one guiding star that will lead him to salvation. Even if we do not achieve perfect peace on earth, because perfect peace is not of this earth, common endeavors to gain peace will unite individuals and nations in trust and friendship and help to make our human community safer and kinder.

Of the sweets of adversity, and let me say that these are not numerous, I have found the sweetest, the most precious of all, is the lesson I learnt on the value of kindness. Every kindness I received, small or big, convinced me that there could never be enough of it in our world. To be kind is to respond with sensitivity and human warmth to the hopes and needs of others. Even the briefest touch of kindness can lighten a heavy heart. Kindness can change the lives of people.

Ultimately our aim should be to create a world free from the displaced, the homeless and the hopeless, a world of which each and every corner is a true sanctuary where the inhabitants will have the freedom and the capacity to live in peace. Every thought, every word, and every action that adds to the positive and the wholesome is a contribution to peace. Each and every one of us is capable of making such a contribution. Let us join hands to try to create a peaceful world where we can sleep in security and wake in happiness.

They Call It Terror Tuesday

Vast Left Conspiracy

A distressing front page article in the New York Times yesterday, entitled "Secret Kill List" Tests Obama's Principles And Will, describes how Obama has placed himself “at the helm of a top-secret ‘nominations’ process to designate terrorists for kill or capture, for which the capture part has become largely theoretical.”  Or, as Glenn Greenwald put it, "an actual presidential-led death panel (as always in American media parlance, “Terrorist” means: individuals alleged by the U.S. Government — with no evidence, transparency or due process — to be Terrorists)."

Specifically, as Greenwald continues, "Obama himself 'insisted on approving every new name on an expanding ‘kill list,’ poring over terrorist suspects’ biographies on what one official calls the macabre ‘baseball cards’ of an unconventional war.'  In total secrecy — with no transparency or oversight of any kind — he then selects who will live and who will die."

David Swanson has more:

Obama is depicted as "keeping the tether short" by personally deciding on each and every drone kill. And yet, despite this personal care and attention, Obama has dramatically increased drone kills. The New York Times writes that Obama's role of "personally overseeing the shadow war with Al Qaeda" is "without precedent in presidential history." This is either because whatever the "shadow war with Al Qaeda" is has been created by Obama, or it's because Bush let subordinate(s) oversee it. This meaningless claim immediately follows bragging about how many of Obama's advisers the New York Times interviewed in order to produce it, and yet somehow the underwhelmed reader is still left to simply guess what is supposed to be meant. Presumably it is that Obama has created a new form of murder.

In fact, Obama has created drone wars, and an insider picture of how he runs them is found at the end of the article:

"Every week or so, more than 100 members of the government's sprawling national security apparatus gather, by secure video teleconference, to pore over terrorist suspects' biographies and recommend to the president who should be the next to die. This secret 'nominations' process is an invention of the Obama administration, a grim debating society that vets the PowerPoint slides bearing the names, aliases and life stories of suspected members of Al Qaeda's branch in Yemen or its allies in Somalia's Shabab militia."

How do Obama's principles and will manifest themselves in this "due process" as he bestows it upon his victims? Well, according to the New York Times, he kills "without hand-wringing" and calls the decision to kill a U.S. citizen "an easy one." (Killing the same man's teenage son is so easy it goes unmentioned.) Obama is "a realist," who is "never carried away" by any campaign promises he may have made. He shrewdly maneuvers to keep in place Bush's powers of rendition, detention, and war . . . .

The Obama Administration is no doubt thrilled with the Times piece as illustrating the President's toughness in the fight against the terrorists.  But I find it chilling how we have come to accept from Obama programs and policies that would have been (and were) harshly condemned when conducted by Bush-Cheney.  As Greenwald writes today, we now see "how rapidly true extremism becomes normalized."

The key difference between Obama and his predecessor is not the policy but the personality.  While we could not contemplate that Bush-Cheney would carefully balance national security and human rights, Obama, the former-constitutional law professor, can surely be trusted to take a principled and prudent approach with the awesome powers bestowed upon the "commander in chief" in the never-ending war on terror. 

Andrew Rosenthal, the editorial editor at the Times correctly worries about this "just trust me" approach to targeted killings:

 If Mr. Obama wants to authorize every drone strike, fine—but even the president requires oversight (remember checks and balances?) which he won’t allow. The administration refuses to accept judicial review (from a FISA-style court, say) prior to a strike directed at an American citizen, and won’t deign to release the legal documents written to justify the targeted killing program. The Times and the ACLU have both sued to force disclosure of these documents. No luck yet.

Apologists for the president’s “just trust me” approach to targeted killings emphasize that the program is highly successful and claim that the drone strikes are extraordinarily precise. John Brennan, the president’s counter-terrorism adviser, said in a recent speech that not a single non-combatant had been killed in a year of drone strikes in Afghanistan and Pakistan. And today’s Times article quoted a senior administration official who said that civilian deaths were in the “single digits.”

But it turns out that even this hey-it’s-better-than-carpet-bombing justification is rather flimsy. The Times article says “Mr. Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties …It in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.”
The logic, such as it is, is that people who hang around places where Qaeda operatives hang around must be up to no good. That’s the sort of approach that led to the false imprisonment of thousands of Iraqis, including the ones tortured at Abu Ghraib.

As Rosenthal concludes, " Mr. Obama used to denounce that kind of thinking."  So did we.

Death's Double Standard

By Tony Platt, cross-posted from his website, GoodToGo

It’s good news that the United Nations has authorized University of Arizona professor James Anaya, Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, to carry out its first investigation into the status of Native Americans in the United States, with a particular focus on American compliance with standards embodied in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, to which the US became a signatory in 2010.

The focus of Anaya’s scrutiny no doubt will be on today’s inequalities and injustices that deeply impact 2.7 million Native Americans throughout the country. But let’s not forget the inequities of death.

Despite popular images of tribal members getting rich from gaming pay-offs, the overwhelming majority of Native Americans remain mired in poverty, the victims of structural unemployment and racial exclusion, compounded by devastating rates of diabetes, suicide, infant mortality, and cardiovascular and alcohol-related diseases. There is a long way to go before, in the words of the Declaration, “indigenous peoples are equal to all other peoples” entitled to the right to “self-determination” and to “be free from discrimination of any kind.”

Inequality is a problem for the dead as well as the living. According to Article 12 of the U.N. Declaration, native peoples have a right to “the use and control of their ceremonial objects, and the repatriation of their human remains.” Repatriation as a central demand of Native American movements in the United States speaks to the long history of plunder of native artifacts and bodies.

Over a period of some two hundred years, from Thomas Jefferson’s exploration of a Native American barrow near his home in Virginia, to passage of the federal Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) in 1990, several hundred thousand native grave sites – maybe as many as one million – were dug up in the name of science, recreation, and commerce. There was a brisk trade in native body parts and funerary artifacts, propelled by the popularity of commercial and recreational “collecting,” scientific curiosity, and the heritage industry. The artifacts removed from graves ended up in private collections and public display cases around the world, including the Smithsonian, Royal Museum of Ethnology in Berlin, the British Museum in London, and museums in Prague, Zurich, Vienna, and Moscow.



During the 19th and early 20th centuries, scientists in universities and museums engaged in a frenzy of acquisition in the hope that native bodies would shed light on the origins of the species or on racial typologies of human difference. They were particularly interested in the bodies of Indians, who, it was believed, had been frozen in time since the Stone Age, and whose remains therefore were thought to hold the key to “secrets of human origins,” as well as provide physical evidence for claims about European superiority and native degeneracy. This science made it easier to frame the near extermination of native peoples in the imagery of natural rather than social history, subject to inevitable processes of erosion and decline, rather than as the result of human intervention and – in the case of California – genocide.

In widely read treatises – such as Samuel Morton’s Crania America (1839), Ales Hrdlicka’s Directions for Collecting Information and Specimens for Physical Anthropology (1904), and Edward Gifford’s Californian Anthropometry (1926) – the measurement of brain cavities, nostrils, and degree of slope in foreheads generated all kinds of scientific quackery to justify the civilizational superiority of white Europeans and innate inferiority of native peoples.

Aside from the racist assumptions that guided research on native bodies, the science was also flawed because documentation of provenience of bones and artifacts found in graves was often nonexistent. Moreover, scientists harvested far more corpses than they could ever study. Tens of thousands of native dead were stashed in boxes, cellars, and personal collections, only to be resurrected for display in cabinets of curiosities, museums, schools, and international expositions. A skull collected on Santa Rosa Island was included in the US exhibition at the Columbian Historical Exposition in Madrid in 1892. In the 1920s and 1930s, a self-styled amateur archaeologist dug up hundreds of dead Tongva Indians and used their bones to decorate his Catalina Museum of Island Indians. To this day, the Favell Museum in Klamath Falls, Oregon, proudly displays native artifacts looted from graves.

With passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act in 1990, the practice of widespread grave looting was officially stopped. Moreover, NAGPRA requires federally funded institutions to publish their holdings of native body parts, as well as artifacts taken from graves, and to facilitate their return to tribes that are able to make a case for genealogical or cultural connection.

NAGPRA was as significant a piece of legislation for Native Americans as the Civil Rights Act was for African Americans. And, similarly, it represents an unfinished revolution. The pace of repatriating human remains is glacially slow: by 2009, less than five percent nationwide had been returned to tribes. By 2010, the University of California at Berkeley had repatriated only 179 of its 10,000 native body parts.

There is nothing inherently wrong with using the dead to reconstruct the past. With the help of new developments in chemistry, DNA analysis and dating methods, we can learn a great deal from human remains about how our ancestors lived, worked, and died. Respectful collaboration between community groups, advocacy organizations, politicians, and scientists in New York in the 1990s, for example, made it possible to excavate what had been the Negros Buriel Ground, resulting in a detailed portrait of the daily lives of Africans in colonial New Amsterdam in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. A similar collaboration between the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe, archaeologists, and Pacific Gas and Electric Company – following the inadvertent exposure of native burials in Santa Clara, California, in 2008 – produced a great deal of information about the lives and deaths of Ohlone neophytes buried in the mission at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries.

For most twentieth century archaeology, however, the decision to excavate and exhume native remains was typically made unilaterally and imposed by fiat.  The problem is not with the search for knowledge, but rather the unequal relations of power between investigator and subject, collector and collected; the lack of consultation and permission, the arrogance run wild; and how the products of knowledge are misused.

It’s not only the unauthorized digging up of ancestors that haunts the memory of native peoples, it’s also the blatant double standard that adds indignity to insult. Remembrance and treatment of the dead is a highly selective political project. Some of our collective dead are respected, others humiliated. Consider some examples:

•    The priests who worked at Mission Carmel in California from 1771 to 1833 are buried in solid tombs and named in headstones. Junipero Serra, architect of the mission system, is interred in an ornate crypt. The thousands of Ohlones, whose slave labor built and ran the mission, are buried anonymously in mass pits. When I visited Mission Carmel in February with Louise J. Miranda Ramirez, tribal chairwoman of the Ohlone/Costanoan-Esselen Nation, she picked up several items from the ground. “Look,” she showed me, “these are human bones dug up by gophers. I’ve asked the authorities to bring in soil and cover the graves with some protection, but they don’t do anything.”

•    In the second half of the 19th century, while scientists and collectors raided native cemeteries for booty and bodies, the nation made amends for the Civil War by creating a system of national cemeteries and making a conscientious effort to preserve the names and identities of those killed. Today, a Defense Department unit with an annual budget of $55 million searches the world for unaccounted soldiers killed in the line of duty. No comparable effort is put into retrieving thousands of native remains unceremoniously stored in university, military, and museum basements.

•    An expensive effort, led by the FBI, is currently under way to find the remains of a six-year old boy killed in New York more than thirty years ago. Recently, a national scandal erupted when it was revealed that the mortuary at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware dumped in a landfill the body parts of some victims of the September 11, 2001 tragedy. Similarly, the Pentagon expressed strong condemnation of the Los Angeles Times for publishing photographs of American soldiers posing with the body parts of dead Afghan insurgents. No such objections were made when museums and newspapers throughout most of the 20th century displayed native skeletons as objects of curiosity and entertainment. 

•    A debate is under way today about the propriety of excavating the wreck of the Titanic when it may contain corpses that, say Federal officials, should be accorded the respect of a graveyard and shielded from “looters and artifact hunters.” In contrast, the University of California, Berkeley, is closing the Hearst Museum for two years in order to “renovate and transform its public spaces.” There are no plans, apparently, to give 10,000 native remains stacked in a dank basement a respectful burial or commemorate their theft from native graveyards.

Federal policies of repatriation are a step in the right direction. But most native remains are unclaimed or unknown. What should be a national ritual of remembrance and mourning has become a technical, bureaucratic process. In addition to tribal claims for the return of their dead, there is also a need for public commemoration that speaks to a national tragedy. Throughout much of the 20th century, while the government built memorials to the victims of world wars and now, as it continues to make efforts to account for every person missing from the Vietnam War, hundreds of thousands of native bones and skulls have been stored anonymously in basements and boxes, and their burial goods displayed as mementos of a “vanishing race” or as freak show curiosities. However much we have tried to assiduously forget this sorrowful history, the past continues to reverberate in the here and now. It is time to do justice to our living dead.

Can Corporations Violate Human Rights?

By John Knox, cross-posted from Center for Progressive Reform

On February 28, the Supreme Court will hear argument in Kiobel v Royal Dutch Petroleum, a case with far-reaching implications for efforts to hold corporations accountable when they commit or are complicit in abuses of human rights.

For over fifty years, Shell has extracted oil from Nigeria, causing great harm to the environment and people of the Niger delta.  The Ogoni people living in the delta protested Shell’s operations, and in response the Nigerian government harshly oppressed them.  Most infamously, in 1995 it executed the author Ken Saro-Wiwa, together with eight other leaders of the protests.  

Esther Kiobel, the widow of one of the executed men, as well as other affected Ogoni, sued Shell in U.S. federal court, claiming that it aided and abetted the Nigerian government in its violations of human rights law.  The plaintiffs relied on the Alien Tort Statute (ATS), a law enacted by the First Congress, in 1789, which gives federal courts jurisdiction over claims by aliens arising from torts committed in violation of international law.  In 2004, in Sosa v Alvarez-Machain, the Supreme Court affirmed that the ATS still provides jurisdiction for international tort claims, but it cautioned federal courts not to recognize claims “for violations of any international law norm with less definite content and acceptance among civilized nations than the historical paradigms” familiar when the law was enacted.  As an example of such a historical paradigm, the Court cited the long-standing prohibition against piracy.

Foreign plaintiffs have used the ATS to accuse corporations of committing grave human rights abuses, including genocide, war crimes, and forced labor.  A few of the suits have resulted in payments, including a 2009 settlement by Shell of another claim arising from its Nigerian operations.  In 2010, however, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals rejected Esther Kiobel’s claim on the sweeping ground that corporations could never be liable for violations of customary international law, because customary international law never imposes any obligations on corporations.  In short order, the Seventh, Ninth, and D.C. Circuits rejected the Second Circuit decision, holding that plaintiffs can sue corporations under the Alien Tort Statute.

Last fall, the Supreme Court granted certiorari to review the Second Circuit decision.  Its ruling will be its first ATS decision since Sosa, and it will determine whether the many other pending ATS suits against corporations may continue.  It’s possible that the Court will decide the case on grounds that allow it to avoid addressing corporate duties under international law.  But if the Supreme Court does take on international law, as seems likely, what should it decide?  Is the Second Circuit correct that international norms do not prohibit corporate abuses of human rights?


The Second Circuit is wrong, but it isn’t completely wrong.  Most obligations under human rights treaties are explicitly placed on states, not individuals or corporations.  That doesn’t mean that human rights law has nothing to say about non-state actors, though.  On the contrary, one of the main obligations it imposes on states is to protect against human rights abuses committed by non-state actors, including corporations.  In that sense, human rights law clearly imposes indirect duties on individuals and corporations.  They include, for example, obligations not to engage in slavery.

Although the Supreme Court might conclude that these indirect duties are enough to satisfy the language of the ATS, it seems more likely that it will look for evidence that international law may impose direct duties on corporations.  No one doubts that international law imposes direct duties on individuals not to commit certain particularly heinous abuses, including genocide and war crimes.  The Nuremberg and Tokyo tribunals tried and convicted individuals of violating international law, and today individuals who commit genocide, war crimes, and other international crimes are subject to prosecution before the International Criminal Court.

The Second Circuit based much of its decision on the fact that these criminal tribunals were not given the authority to try corporations.  Nuremberg tried officials of I.G. Farben, but not the company itself, for using slave labor.  But the decisions not to try corporations for committing international crimes were reached not because corporations were thought to be exempt from international norms, but because many countries don’t impose criminal liability on corporations.  Civil liability, as under the ATS, is a different matter.  I.G. Farben wasn’t off the hook just because it wasn’t sentenced at Nuremberg.  On the contrary, as Judge Richard Posner explained for the Seventh Circuit:  “At the end of the Second World War the allied powers dissolved German corporations that had assisted the Nazi war effort, along with Nazi government and party organizations – and did so on the authority of customary international law.”  I.G. Farben was declared to have “knowingly and prominently engaged in building up and maintaining the German war potential” and its assets were seized.

The application of human rights law to corporations has become clearer in recent years, thanks in large part to the efforts of Harvard Professor John Ruggie, who in 2005 was appointed Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General on Business and Human Rights.  After years of consultations with governments, corporations, and human rights groups, he proposed Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, which the UN Human Rights Council unanimously adopted last summer.  The Guiding Principles emphasize that corporations have a responsibility to respect human rights, and that states have a legal duty under international law to protect against corporate human rights abuses and to provide remedies for such abuses when they do occur.

By providing such remedies, the ATS can provide critical support to the Guiding Principles and other efforts to bring human rights law to bear on corporations.  Its threat of civil liability helps to encourage corporations to support and implement their responsibility to respect, as many corporations around the world already have. 

The most defensible result for the Supreme Court in Kiobel would be a decision that legal persons are just as subject to human rights law as natural persons are.  A decision affirming the Second Circuit’s position that corporations – unlike governments or individuals – are uniquely free from any duty to abide by human rights norms would be a step backwards legally as well as morally.


John Knox is a law professor at Wake Forest University School of Law and a member scholar at the Center for Progressive Reform.

Syria: A Human Security Approach

The key to any intervention is to combine upholding human rights inside Syria with de-escalation of the broader regional conflict. Far from being contradictory, these two goals – human rights and peace – reinforce each other. 

By Mary Kaldor, cross-posted from openDemocracy


The United Nations Human Rights Council has described the Syrian government’s repression of peaceful protests as ‘crimes against humanity’. Even the shocking number that is widely quoted of 7,000 people killed cannot convey the sheer horror of what is happening including shelling, torture, arbitrary detention, child-rape and other atrocities. Reports suggest some 50,000 people are missing, some 60,000 have been imprisoned, and a minimum of 15,000 (the number of refugees in Turkey) have been forced to leave their homes.

The scale of violence gripping Syria today has long crossed the line of a domestic issue. The international community is obliged both morally and legally to intervene to stop the violence – to protect Syrian civilians and to establish conditions for peaceful political change. The question is what form should such an intervention take?

What began as an inspiring non-violent protest is degenerating into something that has all the hallmarks of what I call a ‘new war’ ^↑ . The Assad regime is showing many of the characteristics of a weak state. The economic sanctions imposed by the west are beginning to take their toll. The regime cannot rely on the army. Reportedly it has been unable to call up more than 60% of the reserves.

When army units are sent to repress protestors there are usually many defections. Instead the regime relies on the Republican Guard, the intelligence agencies and some extremist militias known as Shabbiha, all of whom act with great savagery. The regime has been engaged in fomenting sectarian conflict, distributing weapons and sandbags to the Alawite community and spreading horrendous stories of ethnic hatred on the part of the majority Sunnis. It has also, reportedly begun to release criminals from gaol, a practice pioneered by Milosevic, Saddam Hussein and Gadhafi. Indeed Assad has talked of creating ‘another Afghanistan’.



For its part, the opposition is fragmented. The Syrian National Council leadership is based in Paris. Coordinating Committees have been established inside Syria . The Free Syria Army with leadership based in Anatakya, Turkey, is composed of defecting soldiers who seem to have established their own independent brigades such as the Hamza Al-Qatib Brigade or the Salaheddine Al-Ayoubi brigade called after victims of the repression or historical figures. The SNC has sought to control the FSA including through the establishment of the FSA Military Council led by a higher ranking officer than the leader of the FSA. But it has met stiff resistance and the FSA seems to operate rather independently. Although in an agreement with the Syrian National Council they declared that their strategy was ‘defensive protection of civilians’, there have been a number of high profile offensive operations, such as the attack on the air force headquarters or the assassination of the head of the military hospital in Damascus just yesterday (though the FSA did not take responsibility for this). Al Qaeda ^↑ has also announced support for the opposition and may have been responsible for spectacular bomb attacks in Damascus and Aleppo.

New wars have a tendency to spread and to last a long time. Opponents of external intervention warn of the potential of igniting protracted conflict with catastrophic regional spillovers but this is even more likely to happen in the absence of any intervention, if the  current violence in Syria today is left unchecked.

The events in Syria take place at the intersection of two contravening dynamics.  On the one hand, the Arab Spring is sweeping away decades-old authoritarian regimes and threatening to upend the geopolitical status quo far beyond the region. It is creating unfamiliar and uncomfortable uncertainties from Moscow to Washington and from Bejing to Tel Aviv. On the other hand, the escalating confrontation with Iran over its quest to acquire nuclear weapons appears to be a classic case of old geopolitics. Actors are sorted into an Iran/ Syria/ Hezbollah axis with Russia and China not far behind and an Israel/US axis with Europe not far behind. Should this polarization spill into an open conflict, it would put an end to the Arab Spring’s democratic tide, turning the region into a proxy battlefield for an old/new cold war between global players.  This may be one reason why a series of apparently unrelated developments seem to be moving us inexorably towards this scenario. But the new cold war would not end in the restoration of ‘order and stability’; rather it might mean ongoing persistent violence over ever greater swathes of territory.

Up to now, outside efforts on Syria have been ineffectual. Sanctions may have weakened the economy but they do not seem to have affected the determination of those targeted. The Arab League did succeed in sending civilian monitors in in December although there were not enough of them; they did not protect civilians, and they were led by a Sudanese indicted war criminal. Nevertheless, violence does seem to have abated while they were present. But they have been withdrawn and the Arab League turned to the UN. Russia and China vetoed the UN Security Council resolution proposed by the Arab League that called on Assad to step down and hand over power to his Vice President to supervise a transition to democratic elections, giving Assad a sense of impunity. Within hours the regime had attacked the city of Homs; hence the horrific violence that we are witnessing now.

What’s next?

The next step being proposed is a UN Arab League civilian monitoring mission or peace-keeping force or both. Saudi Arabia has turned to the General Assembly which can act when blocked by the Security Council through a Uniting for Peace resolution. This would be combined with talks on a political transition. Opposition groups are suggesting more robust action. The coordinating committees propose that civilian monitors should be accompanied by armed guards. The Syrian National Council has proposed the establishment of a safe haven in the Northern province of Idlib where much of the FSA is based. The safe haven would be declared an international protectorate but would be defended by the FSA backed by western air power.

From the beginning of the uprising over a year ago a dichotomy emerged between those calling for the internationalisation of the conflict and those suggesting that it should be left to the Syrians to resolve it through dialogue. It is clear today that the latter is no longer an option.  Indeed it would be morally reprehensible to allow the slaughter to continue unchecked. The key to any intervention is to combine upholding human rights inside Syria with de-escalation of the broader regional conflict.  Far from being contradictory, these two goals – human rights and peace – reinforce each other. On the one hand, an intervention in Syria which takes account of Russian and Chinese concerns is likely to allow for a more consensual approach to Iran’s nuclear issue. Likewise, de-escalation of the conflict with Iran should reduce opposition in Moscow and Beijing to a solution that involves the removal of the Assad regime.

There is also supposed to be a dichotomy between political or diplomatic approaches or military approaches. The problem is that political or diplomatic approaches usually refer to talks with the regime and those who are committing crimes against humanity and may effectively legitimate and entrench their political role. On the other hand military approaches tend to mean war-fighting rather than the defensive use of force. The problem with this kind of military intervention is that it can easily escalate and sharpen polarisation and it may end up killing those it is supposed to protect. It can be argued that in Libya, effectively, the west intervened in a war on the side of the rebels rather than being focused on civilian protection and this may or may not have been the right thing to do. But if this were tried in Syria, it could result not in a victory for the rebels but in a widening regional conflict.

A human security approach brings together peace and human rights and involves both political intervention, broadly defined, combined with efforts to directly affect what is happening on the ground. The latter may involve the use of force but not in war fighting ways. This could mean:

- A UN-Arab League civilian monitoring mission, which would establish a presence throughout the contested parts of Syria.
- An international or regional peace force that would establish safe havens under UN/Arab League protection connected by humanitarian corridors so as to affect the reality on the ground.
- Political negotiations aimed at the removal of the Assad regime and an orderly transition to democracy
- De-escalation of the conflict with Iran over nuclear weapons. 

Such an approach would focus on minimising violence and creating conditions for peaceful and inclusive political processes as well as broader geo-political efforts to build consensus.

Baltasar Garzón And The Politics Of Justice

Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón is a heroic figure who gained international notoriety in 1998, when he ordered the arrest of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet for the alleged deaths and torture of Spanish citizens.  Ten years later, he tried to fill a vacuum left by the Obama Administration by seeking to investigate whether six senior Bush administration officials, the Bush Six, were responsible for "an authorized and systematic plan for torture" at Guantanamo.  (See No Spain, No Gain)  The torture investigation languished when Garzon was suspended after being charged with abusing his powers to investigate Spanish Civil War atrocities, and the case was assigned to another judge.  As Pia Navazo writes below, Garzon's efforts to investigate killings of civilians during the era of General Franco’s dictatorship has made him a legal target, raising profound legal and moral issues.  -- Lovechilde

By Pia Navazo, cross-posted from openDemocracy

The well-known and high-profile Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón faces a private prosecution over his attempt to investigate crimes committed under the regime of Francisco Franco, which ruled Spain for thirty-six years following his forces’ victory in the civil war of 1936-39.

Garzón is accused on three separate charges of “malfeasance” for having exceeded his powers and contravened Spain’s amnesty law, passed in 1977 - two years after Franco’s death, and in the early stages of the country’s transition to democracy. Garzón himself and Spain’s state prosecutor appealed to Spain’s supreme court to dismiss the case against him, but on 31 January 2012 the judges on the court voted ^↑ (by a four-to-three margin) to reject requests from both. This ruling is independent of the final ruling on the merits of the charges.

A prosecution of judges for malfeasance is very rare in Spain. It is equally rare for the state prosecutor to support a defendant’s request for dismissal. Still, the supreme court dismissed the arguments put forward by Judge Garzón on the grounds that “they didn’t have sufficient weight”. As a result, the private prosecution of Garzón was allowed and the trial began immediately.

Judge Garzón told ^↑ the court that he did what he felt compelled to do in pursuing the investigations. He drew on precedents set by the Scilingo case ^↑ when the Argentine military officer Adolfo Scilingo was convicted by the Spanish supreme court for attempted genocide and other crimes committed during Argentina’s “dirty war” of 1976-83. The state prosecutor initially challenged that investigation but changed its position and supported the case on the basis that the crimes being investigated were crimes against humanity. At the time, the supreme court affirmed the judge’s obligation to investigate facts that could amount to such crimes.

Judge Garzón argued that he had received reports regarding detailed events that took place during and after the civil war, which involved alleged crimes such as extra-judicial executions, enforced disappearances and torture. He argued further that the amnesty law only applies to crimes “of a political nature”, meaning crimes with a political connection, and - on the grounds that crimes against humanity cannot be considered political acts - rejected the allegation that he had the intention to proceed in violation of the amnesty law in investigating these crimes.

Moreover, crimes against humanity are not limited in duration, they have effects that continue over time. Judge Garzón pointed out that forced disappearances were crimes which had a “permanent” and ongoing effect as long as no bodies have been found, in part because this prevents relatives from their right to arrange a proper burial.

Judge Garzón reiterated that he sought only to defend victims’ rights to truth, justice and reparation. He denied all accusations of political bias or ideology in accepting the case. It is not a matter of ideology, he said, that “there were hundreds of thousands of victims whose rights have not been addressed”. This part of Garzón’s contribution was designed to address accusations of bias against him as a result of claims that he had, in response to complaints filed by right-wing victims’ associations, relied on procedural reasons to deny his competence to investigate crimes of the same era.

Judge Garzón concluded by stating that he had always respected the law; that he took his decision based upon respect for both the national law of Spain and international laws governing human rights (he cited several precedents of the European Court of Human Rights in particular); and that he did so by following an acceptable and defensible line of interpretation.

A question of responsibility

For some, the supreme-court ruling to allow the trial to proceed must be seen as a concession by the court to Judge Garzón’s multiple enemies, both political and judicial. Others argue that it is imperative to be clear whether he has indeed committed a crime of judicial malfeasance. In any event, the legitimacy of Spain’s judicial system hangs in the balance.

So, too, does the global fight against impunity for international crimes. A conviction of Judge Garzón for a crime that amounts to an attempt to investigate mass atrocities will set a negative precedent and will be a setback in generating the will to pursue such prosecutions elsewhere in the world.

Reed Brody, legal counsel of Human Rights Watch, comments that Judge Garzón’s application of the principle of universal jurisdiction in the Augusto Pinochet case created the so-called “Garzón effect”: a justice cascade that empowered victims all over the world to challenge transitional arrangements, including amnesties in different countries (such as Uruguay, Argentina, Guatemala, and several African states). The effect was to force courts to confirm that the obligations of a country to investigate mass atrocities cannot be extinguished by amnesty laws or the passage of time. The irony, says Brody, is that Judge Garzón is being prosecuted in Spain for trying to apply the principles that he successfully promoted internationally.

In Spain, lawyers and human-rights activists expressed support for Garzón. María Ángeles Siemens, local director of the UNHCR and president of the civil-rights association, said that “victims’ right to reparation is a part if international law and international law on human rights. In Garzón’s trial, what is being discussed is not simply the case itself, but a defence of international law when the Spanish supreme court has refused to hear the victims.”

Manuel Ollé. president of the Spanish association for human rights, said it was incomprehensible that a judge could be prosecuted when, after all, the crimes of the Franco era are crimes against humanity. Spain has clear obligations in this regard under international law, he said.

Indeed, if a judge is not competent to investigate such crimes in Spain, who shall be competent to provide justice to victims of the dictatorship and the civil war?

Upside Down Justice: Prosecuting Whistleblowing Not Torture

The prosecution of torture whistleblower John Kiriakou criminalizes the revelation of illegality, and decriminalizes the torture. -- Daniel Ellsberg

John Kiriakou, the CIA's former director of counterterrorism operations in Pakistan, has been charged with four felony counts for having allegedly disclosed classified information to reporters about the CIA’s interrogation program. Included among those charges are two counts under the Espionage Act of 1917.  John Rudolph at Huffington Post reports that "Kiriakou allegedly leaked information to reporters about two CIA agents directly involved in interrogations of terrorism suspects during the Bush administration that used waterboarding -- a simulated drowning technique that President Obama has himself described as torture."

Kiriakou, the New York Times explains, was "a leader of the team that captured Abu Zubaydah, and he came to public attention in late 2007 when he gave an interview to ABC News portraying the suffocation technique called waterboarding as torture, but calling it necessary."

This is the the sixth prosecution by the Obama Administration of a whistleblower.  (See Put Your Lips Together And . . . Get Indicted.)  What is particularly disturbing about each of these cases is the Justice Department's reliance on the draconian Espionage Act by characterizing the leaking of classified information to reporters as "aiding the enemy."  As Rudolph notes, the 1917 espionage law has only been used three times previously to prosecute leaks to the media.   And, as Charlie Savage in the Times states, Obama has brought “more such cases than all previous presidents combined.”

Daniel Ellsberg, Rudolph writes, called it "brazenly hypocritical" to prosecute Kiriakou for leaking information related to waterboarding while those who performed it were granted immunity:  "You're criminalizing the revelation of illegality and you're decriminalizing the illegality -- the torture."

Glenn Greenwald sums up the Administration's philosophy.  First, "if you are a high-ranking government official who commits war crimes, you will receive full-scale immunity, both civil and criminal, and will have the American President demand that all citizens Look Forward, Not Backward."  But, "if you talk publicly about any of these war crimes, you have committed the Gravest Crime — you are guilty of espionage – and will have the full weight of the American criminal justice system come crashing down upon you."

As Greenwald concludes:

It’s long past time to rip those blindfolds off of the Lady Justice statues. When the purpose of American justice is to shield those with the greatest power who commit the most egregious crimes, while severely punishing those who talk publicly about those crimes, it’s hard to imagine how it can get much more degraded or corrupted than that.

Obama And Clinton: LGBT Rights Are Human Rights

It always seems to be a case of half empty or half full with Obama.  Case in point is the inconsistency on two classic culture war issues.  As noted in a previous post, the Administration made the astounding decision to overrule an FDA recommendation to make emergency contraception available over-the-counter to women of all ages.  Is there any explanation other than fear of antagonizing religious conservatives?  But then what to make of the brave stance taken to highlight the importance of LGBT rights before the international community? 

"Some have suggested that gay rights and human rights are separate and distinct; but, in fact, they are one and the same."  Hillary Clinton, in recognition of Human Rights Day

While the Republican candidates for president pander to right-wing homophobes (or demonstrate that they are right-wing homophobes), the Obama administration announced it will weigh how countries treat their LGBT communities in making decisions about foreign aid, and directed all agencies engaged abroad to make sure U.S. diplomacy and aid programs “promote and protect” the rights of gays and lesbians.

As stated in a Presidential Memorandum: “The struggle to end discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) persons is a global challenge, and one that is central to the United States commitment to promoting human rights.”

This statement was followed up with a powerful and eloquent speech to the Human Rights Council in Geneva by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who called for "a global consensus that recognizes the human rights of LGBT citizens everywhere."  


Here's a link to the full transcript of this remarkable speech.

Crackdown On Occupy Draws Attention Of UN Special Rapporteur On Freedom Of Expression

"Citizens have the right to dissent with the authorities, and there's no need to use public force to silence that dissension."  UN Special Rapporteur Frank La Rue

Originally established in 1993, by the United Nations Commission on Human Rights (now the Human Rights Council), the Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression has a mandate to investigate "violations of the right to freedom of opinion and expression, discrimination against, threats or use of violence, harassment, persecution or intimidation directed at persons seeking to exercise or to promote the exercise of the right to freedom of opinion and expression . . . "

While we like to think of the United States as a beacon of democracy and bastion of free expression, the use of tear gas, pepper spray and military-style tactics to disperse, remove and arrest Occupy protesters has caught the attention of the current Special Rapporteur, Frank La Rue.  As reported by Dan Froomkin at Huffington Post, La Rue, a long-time Guatemalan human rights lawyer, is "drafting an official communication to the U.S. government demanding to know why federal officials are not protecting the rights of Occupy demonstrators whose protests are being disbanded -- sometimes violently -- by local authorities."

La Rue, in a HuffPost interview asserted that the protesters have a right to occupy public spaces "as long as that doesn't severely affect the rights of others."  But, as we all know by now, Occupy encampments across the country have been disbanded, often with excessive force by police in riot gear.  La Rue acknowledged that while "the use of police force is legitimate to maintain public order," there must be a clear and present danger of real harm."  In addition, he stated, "there has to be a proportionality of the force employed to prevent a real danger."

It is clear to La Rue that the Occupy protesters are raising and addressing a fundamental issue. "There is legitimate reason to be indignant and angry about a crisis that was originated by greed and the personal interests of certain sectors," especially when the bankers "still earn very hefty salaries and common folks are losing their homes."  Thus, "in this case, the demonstrations are going to the center of the issue."

La Rue's "official communication" to the U.S. government will "ask what exactly is the position of the federal government in regards to understanding the human rights and constitutional rights vis-a-vis the use of local police and local authorities to disband peaceful demonstrations."

That is a very good question.

Torture, Indefinite Detention & The American Way

When the Senate took up the defense spending bill this week it included truly dreadful provisions allowing for indefinite military detention.  An amendment offered by Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colo.) that would have removed these provisions was defeated.  The amendment garnered only 38 votes, with 17 Democrats voting to reject it.   

The New York Times explains what the bill now includes:

[It] would require the government to place into military custody any suspected member of Al Qaeda or one of its allies connected to a plot against the United States or its allies. The provision would exempt American citizens, but would otherwise extend to arrests on United States soil. The executive branch could issue a waiver and keep such a prisoner in the civilian system.
A related provision would create a federal statute saying the government has the legal authority to keep people suspected of terrorism in military custody, indefinitely and without trial. It contains no exception for American citizens.

The National Defense Authorization Act goes to a conference committee next week, and if the provisions are not stripped there, it will be up to President Obama to follow through with his veto threat.  He would be the first president in fifty years to veto a defense spending bill. 

Meanwhile, another amendment to the defense bill by Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) hoped to authorize "enhanced interrogations," i.e., torture.  Her proposal would "roll back the 2009 Obama executive order against torture by re-establishing a secret 'classified' set of interrogation techniques and then attaching them to the current 'Army Field Manual' on human intelligence collection."  Apparently, the amendment was not voted upon this time, but there is concern that Ayotte will find another opportunity to offer it.

And we know from the most recent GOP presidential debate, that most of the Republican candidates for president proudly claimed they would reinstate waterboarding and other enhanced interrogation techniques.

It is in this context that Amy Davidson of The New Yorker writes about the chilling new United Nations report on Syria's use of torture and killing of children.  She points out that while Syria is not our ally, we have made use of Syria's prisons and its methods in our war on terror. As Davidson says, while we may not have committed torture ourselves of the prisoners we transferred to Syria via extraordinary rendition and we may not torture children, "we have used torture, and as we have learned in the Republican debates and on the floor of Congress, there is in no way a consensus that this is even a source of mild embarrassment. Some of our politicians seem proud of it."

The issuance of the UN's report, Davidson points out, unavoidably brings up the "the cost of torture generally, including, in this instance, to our own moral standing."  Indeed.  When "one would wish for a unified international chorus against the use of torture," and "when the world needs to let Syria know how unacceptable its behavior is," we are left with the Senate passing a provision allowing indefinite military detention, some Senators seeking to pass amendments to rescind the ban against using torture, and virtually all the Republicans seeking the presidency declaring to enthusiastic applause that they would authorize enhanced interrogation techniques and that waterbording isn't torture.

As Davidson remarks, "the idea that, as a nation, we ought to live in such a way as to always be able to make torturers feel ashamed is not such a radical thought."  At least it shouldn't be.

Just Say No To Indefinite Military Detentions

This week, and as early as tonight, the Senate will vote on the 2012 Defense Authorization Bill, which includes a truly awful provision that would permit indefinite detention.  If the bill becomes law, Congress will have given the President the power to order the military to pick up and imprison without charge or trial civilians anywhere in the world.

Chris Anders of the ACLU explains:

The power is so broad that even U.S. citizens could be swept up by the military and the military could be used far from any battlefield, even within the United States itself.  The worldwide indefinite detention without charge or trial provision is in S. 1867, the National Defense Authorization Act bill, which will be on the Senate floor on Monday. The bill was drafted in secret by Sens. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.) and passed in a closed-door committee meeting, without even a single hearing.

While the Obama Administration may ultimately veto the legislation, the only way to ensure the bill doesn't pass is for the Senate to approve the Udall amendment, which would strip the detention provisions and require Congress to use an orderly process to consider whether any detention legislation is needed at all.

It is not too late to contact your senators and urge them to vote YES on the Udall Amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act.

Neocon Nightmare At The GOP Debate

David Addington

First the GOP audience cheered for executions, then for letting the uninsured die, and then for waterboarding.  At the most recent debate, they applauded panel member David Addington -- the alleged mastermind behind the Bush Administration's most extreme positions on executive power and the use of torture and other human rights violations.  Have they no shame?  And what about CNN?  Have they given up all pretense of being a mainstream media operation?  CNN refused to raise critical questions when these guys were running amok in the Bush Administration, and now they treat this sorry collection of discredited neo-conservatives, including Addington, Paul Wolfowitz, and, for old times sake, Ed Meese, as "experts," perfectly qualified to ask potential presidential candidates questions on national security.  Never mind that it is they who should be asked questions -- but in the dock, not on CNN.  RJ Eskow has the gory details below.  -- Lovechilde

Rogue's Gallery: CNN's Ideologically Rigid, Scandal Tainted, Ethics-Investigation-Haunted GOP Debate "Panel"

By Richard (RJ) Eskow, cross-posted from Campaign for America's Future

The story just won't die. People keep commenting on the near-Stalinist level of ideological purity displayed by CNN"s choice of "expert" questioners at last week's Republican national security debate. The network's Neocon Politburo then dutifully proceeded to interrogate the GOP candidates about their devotion to the Cause.

It was an emotional moment, a kind of Big Chill for the Project for a New American Century gang. After all, these characters hadn't been seen in public together since the Bush Days. It wouldn't have been surprising to see Ahmed Chalabi carrying a tray of hors d'ouevres.

Time and time again the neocons were proven spectacularly and tragically wrong. Remember "We'll be welcomed as liberators"? Or the claim that Iraq will be a "cakewalk"? Nobody has believed a word they've said since 2005. Nowhere on Earth are their words given an ounce of credence.
Nowhere, that is, except CNN. We haven't seen national security commentary with so little credibility since Judith Miller interviewed "Curveball."

People are understandably outraged by CNN's ideological extremism, and by its willingness to discard even the thinnest veneer of journalistic objectivity. But there's another cloud over this panel: a cloud of scandals, criminal investigations, and ethical lapses.

David Addington. Paul Wolfowitz. Ed Meese. It's a Rogue's Gallery of government officials gone wild, a motley crew of the short-sighted, the benighted, and the nearly-indicted.

Or, as CNN calls them, "experts."


CNN and the Right: Partners Again

CNN cosponsored one debate with the Tea Party, but maybe that group wasn't extreme enough. This time around CNN's cosponsors were the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation, radical-right organizations that played an active role in misleading the American people into a bloody and costly war. They accomplished that mission. Now these groups are pushing new disinformation campaigns like the one that asserts that climate change is a hoax.

Steve Clemons says that CNN's choice of partners means that the old GOP foreign policy wing represented by Republicans like Lugar, Hagel, and even Kissinger is "an endangered species." Personally, I'd say it's deader than the dodo bird. CNN has all but officially declared its members "non-persons." If a Republican wants to get on CNN today, their résumé better include corruption or scandal.

The words "corruption" and "scandal" can only mean one thing: ladies and gentlemen, it's time to meet our panelists.

Meese the Honorable

The first question was asked by Ronald Reagan's former attorney general, a gentleman Wolf Blitzer described as "the honorable Ed Meese."

Honorable?   As one report put it:

No other member of the Reagan administration, with the exception of Oliver North, was as tainted by scandal as Edwin Meese III ... At one point in his tenure as attorney general Meese was under investigation by three special prosecutors, each inquiring into separate allegations of influence peddling, bribery, and cover-up in the Iran-Contra affair. Though Meese was never charged with any crime, the last of the special investigators said that Meese "had probably broken conflict of interest and income-tax laws, though none of the indictments were worthy of prosecution."

Meese was also investigated for possible bribery and influence peddling regarding an oil pipeline... in Iraq. He was deeply involved in the Iran/Contra scandal. Documents were destroyed during Meese's own purported 'investigation' of those crimes, and Meese refused a request for help from the FBI. Special Prosecutor Lawrence Walsh later called his actions "an effort to obstruct a congressional inquiry.”

Several other investigations noted probable crimes committed by Reagan Administration officials but inexplicably deemed them, like Meese's, "unworthy of prosecution." Others found evidence of criminality that was outside the scope of their investigations. Still, even the most indifferent investigation from those years is an improvement over today's Justice Department, which prefers to simply ignore evidence of criminal wrongdoing by government officials.

The "honorable" Mr. Meese asked the candidates, "Shouldn't we have a long-range extension of the investigative powers contained in the PATRIOT act so that our law enforcement officers can have the tools that they need?"

Objection! Leading the witness! That's always unacceptable, especially from someone who should've been in the dock. Needless to say, Meese's mini-brief for continued suspension of our civil liberties was received with appropriate warmth and enthusiasm by candidates and broadcasters alike.

Torture Man

Chris Hayes was understandably outraged at the inclusion of David Addington, the lawyer employed by Dick Cheney to build specious arguments for deceptive war and illegal torture. Addington's even guiltier of promoting torture than the much-criticized John Yoo, who wrote his now-infamous memo under Addington's supervision.

Addington also pushed for illegal and unconstitutional actions such as "black bag" detentions, warrantless surveillance, and impeding Congressional oversight of intelligence. Colin Powell reportedly remarked that Addington "doesn't care about the Constitution" -- and it shows.

Mr. Addington would undoubtedly have been investigated for criminal violations of law and abuse of power at any other point in our history. Addington repeatedly advised other government officials to ignore both the law and their Constitutional obligations in order to pursue the agenda of his immediate boss, Dick Cheney.

This week he emerged from a long public silence to ask the candidates about "U.S. interests" in the Middle East.

Puppetry of the Panelist

Compared to the unethical and potentially illegal actions of panelists Meese and Addington, a questioner like the American Enterprise Institute's Fred Kagan comes across like a beacon of moral rectitude. Kagan's merely been wrong about Iraq war policy, consistently and repeatedly, while displaying no signs of remorse for his errors.

Kagan helped lead a pseudo-Iraq Study Group for the American Enterprise Institute, after the one created by Washington's leaders displayed insufficient ideological purity. He also seems to have a propensity for letting himself be used as a media puppet for generals who are trying to undermine their civilian leadership by pushing their own preferred strategies in the press.

Kagan stands head and shoulders above some of his co-questioners, if only because he's never been investigated by a special prosecutor or special panel. He's never been charged with wrongdoing, but he's sure been wrong.

A lot.

Call Them Irresponsible

Although the panel was well-stocked with the mendacious, the error-prone, and the scandal-ridden, it still seemed strangely incomplete. Where was Curveball?

CNN violated journalistic ethics by allowing these biased and tainted questioners to participate in the debate. But, on the plus side, it was thoughtful of them to pick people whose records would put current Republican frontrunner Newt Gingrich at ease.

As the Washington Post reported in 1997, Gingrich's own ethics scandal led to his unprecedented punishment, a $300,000 fine to settle charges of Federal tax law violations and lying to Congressional investigators.

The Wolf Pack

Our last panelist is none other than Paul Wolfowitz, that key architect of Bush's disastrous Iraq war who was immortalized on camera licking his comb and then using it to flatten a cowlick. Apparently the shampoo that washes away conscience and moral legitimacy also leaves you with split ends and flyaway hair.

Wolfowitz capped his mismanagement of the Iraq war by leaving the Bush administration to serve as President of the World Bank. There he became embroiled in scandal after giving preferential treatment to his then-girlfriend, an employee of the Bank. An Ad Hoc Group found that Wolfowitz had violated a number of internal Bank rules, as well as its ethical Code of Conduct, with his favoritism toward his lady friend and his public attacks on the investigation into his behavior.

The panel found that Wolfowitz "placed his own personal interests in opposition to that of the institution," and in so doing "undermined ... legal safeguards." It concluded that he "did not agree" with the advice of competent lawyers, so he "instead sought an inadequate review ... after the fact." (Where's Addington when you need him?)

Most of all, the panel concluded that Wolfowitz "saw himself as the outsider to whom the established rules and standards do not apply." They concluded that Wolfowitz had "questionable judgment and a preoccupation with self-interest."

Sound familiar?

The investigators also expressed concern about "one central theme" that ran through Wolfowitz's self-justifications: his repeated and unfounded assertions that "blame for the current situation lies with others."

Neocons never take responsibility for their own behavior. But then, why should they? They never get indicted. These days they're not even investigated. They know the only "time" they're ever going to serve is onscreen, in the warm glow of CNN's lights. And when the lights go down and the cameras are off, they're ushered back to the green room to munch on snacks and sip coffee while their makeup's being removed.

May I offer you an hors d'ouevre, Mr. Wolfowitz?

More Tortured Debate

This is what happens when acts of torture by the prior administration are not investigated and prosecuted because the current President believes that “nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past.”  This is what happens when the present government fails to establish that torture is not only immoral, but illegal, and not only ineffective, but counterproductive.  This is what happens when we fail to punish the perpetrators of torture and other human rights violations. 

In Saturday's debate, the Republican candidates for president proudly claimed -- to applause, I might add -- that they would reinstate waterboarding and other enhanced interrogation techniques.  Herman Cain would use waterboarding  ("Pampering terrorists isn't something that we ought to do").  Michele Bachman said "“If I were president I would be willing to use waterboarding. I think it was very effective.”  Rick Santorum stammered that "we have to use . . . all enhanced interrogation techniques."  And Rick Perry, with his usual swagger said it would be a travesty to fail to "use any technique" to "extract information" that could "save our young people's lives."  And after the debate, Mitt Romney aides told CNN that he does not believe waterboarding is torture, but that he "is not going to spell out what he would employ."  Only Ron Paul and Jon Huntsman objected.

This issue should not be debatable.  But when President Obama took office he refused to allow his Justice Department to investigate, much less prosecute, those in the Bush Administration who authorized torture.  He maintained that since his Administration wouldn't condone torture we can simply move forward.  But we are not moveing forward.  The lack of a true reckoning that confirms once and for all the immorality and illegality of torture makes it far more likely that torture could again become American policy.  As the Republican Party continues to veer further rightward, it is more clear than ever that even if the Obama Administration won't sanction torture and violate human rights, there is nothing to stop the next Administration.

Condi's World: Fantasies and Post Hoc Fallacies

Condoleeza Rice, George W. Bush's former National Security Adviser and Secretary of State, has a disturbing habit of engaging in fantasy.  For example, her unsubstantiated assertion of Iraq's nuclear capability, culminating in her famous remark that "we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."  Of course, there was neither a smoking gun nor a mushroom cloud.

Then there was her embarrassing Freudian slip in which she appeared to refer to Bush as her husband.  Uh, no comment.

And now, in touting her memoir, Rice has the temerity to take credit for the Arab Spring, writing that it vindicates the Bush Administration's policies, including the invasion of Iraq.  More fantasy and a classic example of the Post Hoc Fallacy.

Post hoc ergo propter hoc or "after this, therefore because of this" is a logical fallacy in which one erroneously attributes cause and effect simply because one event occurs before the other.  Put differently, it is a fallacy to conclude that A causes B merely because A occurs before B.

Now, there is clearly a cause and effect between Bush's Iraq invasion and thousands of military and civilian deaths, a revitalized Taliban in Afghanistan, the spreading of Al Qaeda throughout the region, the strengthening of Iran, the tanking of the U.S. economy, and our disgraceful embrace of torture, extraordinary rendition, and other human rights violations.

But the Arab Spring?  Post hoc ergo ...

Digby put it more colorfully:

the logic behind Rice's view inexorably leads you to evaluate everyone in history through the lens of human progress --- which means that none of the great villains can be held responsible for their deeds and nothing can ever be learned from bad decisions of the past. As long as the world goes on you can always make the case that things will probably turn out ok in the long run. And that's hardly any comfort ---as the old saying goes, in the long run, we'll all be dead.

In fact, in the short run a whole lot of Iraqi people are dead because of the United States' inexplicable decision to invade their country. . .  If Iraq becomes a sane and prosperous nation some time from now, it will never render that policy, based on lies and propaganda, to be a good one --- and Bush, Cheney and Rice will never get credit for any future progress because of it. They need accept that the best they can hope for is to end up among history's inept clowns instead of history's villains. It's not much, but it's all they've got.

So, despite their best efforts to rewrite history, will Bush, Cheney and Rice be viewed as villains or inept clowns?  The answer can be found in another philosophical proposition:  The Unity of Opposites.  They can be villains and clowns.

International Execution

Anwar Al-Awlaki

It is being reported this morning that an American drone attack in Yemen killed Anwar al-Awlaki, an American-born cleric tied to Al Qaeda.

I previously wrote about the legal challenge brought by his father challenging the Obama Administration's policy of targeting an American citizen for assassination.  I was particularly incensed by the criticism of the legal team that brought the lawsuit as having crossed some line by representing a suspected terrorist. 

The judge ultimately dismissed the case without reaching the merits, finding that the father did not have standing to sue.  But it is worth taking note of the New York Times Dec. 12th editorial entitled Judicial Scrutiny Before Death, which argued that despite winning in court, "the administration should remain very worried about the moral implications of its policy," which the district court judge "sharply questioned" despite dismissing the lawsuit.  The Times noted that, as the judge wrote, one of the many unanswered questions remaining is whether "the Executive [can] order the assassination of a U.S. citizen without first affording him any form of judicial process whatsoever, based on the mere assertion that he is a dangerous member of a terrorist organization”

The Times stressed the importance of judicial scrutiny, and suggested creating a court that operates in secrecy, "like the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which authorizes wiretaps on foreign agents inside the United States."  Thus, at minimum, "the government could present its evidence to this court behind closed doors before putting a terror suspect on its target list."

After the death of Osama bin Laden, I wrote:

Of course the world is better off without Osama bin Laden, and it is far better that "the face of the Arab world in America’s eyes," as Jon Stewart said, will no longer be bin Laden's, but instead will be "the young people in Egypt and Tunisia and all the Middle Eastern countries around the world where freedom rises up.”  But, while President Obama declared that "justice has been done," if it turns out that bin Laden could have been taken into custody alive without immediate risk to life when more than 20 Navy SEALS entered his compound, then his killing was retribution, not justice.

"Proper justice," as Daniele Archibugi explains, "is made in the tribunals, not outside them."  Perhaps there was no choice, but it would have been "much more judicially satisfactory," if less immediately gratifying, "to have arrested bin Laden," and to give responsibility to the courts, "rather than to a commando" to judge and punish.

As human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson states, justice "requires a fair trial before an independent court."  . . .  What should not be forgotten, as Karen Greenberg reminds us, is that the effect of bin Laden's reign of terror on the United States was to pervert our notion of justice: "Under the rubric of fighting terror, the United States rolled back its hallowed notions of civil liberties, its embrace of modernity, and even its reliance on its own courts. We delved into medieval-style torture, we reneged on our courts as a viable option for trying terrorists, and we blindly took aim at a religion, rather than its disaffected hijackers."

This Administration's "relentless program of wiping out top al-Qaida leaders around the world through unilateral covert strikes" is deeply troubling, both morally and legally.  More so for Al-Awlaki, an American citizen, who was never indicted and not afforded the due process rights to which American citizens are entitled.  As Glenn Greenwald put it:  "he was simply ordered killed by the President: his judge, jury and executioner."

Jameel Jafar,  the A.C.L.U.’s deputy legal director, argued that the government’s targeted killings violated United States and international law.

“As we’ve seen today, this is a program under which American citizens far from any battlefield can be executed by their own government without judicial process, and on the basis of standards and evidence that are kept secret not just from the public but from the courts.” 

Getting Away With Torture

As Human Rights Watch contends, the Obama Administration has failed to meet this country's obligations "to investigate acts of torture and other ill-treatment of detainees" by the prior administration.  It has just released a 107-page report, Getting Away With Torture, which "presents substantial information warranting criminal investigations of Bush and senior administration officials, including former Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and CIA Director George Tenet, for ordering practices such as “waterboarding,” the use of secret CIA prisons, and the transfer of detainees to countries where they were tortured."

Executive Director Kenneth Roth states that despite "solid grounds to investigate Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Tenet for authorizing torture and war crimes . . . President Obama has treated torture as an unfortunate policy choice rather than a crime."  In the absence of a meaningful reckoning, however, "Obama's decision to end abusive interrogation practices will remain easily reversible unless the legal prohibition against torture is clearly reestablished."

Roth asserts that if the United States government refuses to pursue credible criminal investigations, other countries should prosecute US officials involved in crimes against detainees in accordance with international law:  "The US has a legal obligation to investigate these crimes," Roth said. "If the US doesn't act on them, other countries should."

[Related posts:  No Accounting For Torture; Pitfalls of Only Looking Forward, Tortured Logic; No Spain, No Gain.]