No Comment — April 22, 2009, 9:06 am
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It’s not just Spain, apparently. The Washington Post’s Craig Whitlock finds that “European prosecutors are likely to investigate CIA and Bush administration officials on suspicion of violating an international ban on torture if they are not held legally accountable at home.”
Some European countries, under a legal principle known as universal jurisdiction, have adopted laws giving themselves the authority to investigate torture, genocide and other human rights crimes anywhere in the world, even if their citizens are not involved. Although it is rare for prosecutors to win such cases, those targeted can face arrest if they travel abroad. Martin Scheinin, the U.N. special investigator for human rights and counterterrorism, said the interrogation techniques approved by the Bush administration clearly violated international law. He said the lawyers who wrote the Justice Department memos, as well as senior figures such as former vice president Richard B. Cheney, will probably face legal trouble overseas if they avoid prosecution in the United States.
One point on which the European lawyers all agree: the release on Thursday of a set of Justice Department memoranda explicitly approving a series of torture techniques including waterboarding will make prosecution in European courts into child’s play. The Europeans also all agree on another thing: the United States has a duty to investigate and prosecute these cases, and they would all prefer that it do so.
A contrary view comes in the current Newsweek from the dynamic duo of Evan Thomas and Stuart Taylor. In their last joint effort (“What Would Cheney Do?”), they attempted to persuade readers that Barack Obama was going to “do the right thing” and continue all the national security policies of Dick Cheney, starting with the use of plenty of rough stuff with prisoners. The series of pointed attacks that Cheney subsequently launched on the Obama administration well reflects the accuracy of this prediction. This week they take on Yale law dean Harold Koh, attacking his conclusion that the Iraq War was unlawful–although it’s now difficult to find international lawyers with a different view on this point, including most of those who initially supported it. For the Newsweek pair, the fact that there was no basis for the claimed threat of WMDs apparently makes no difference and can’t be allowed to stand in the way of the Bush Doctrine. This sort of thinking has little following in the country outside of a handful of Beltway chatterboxes. Koh’s real sin according to the Newsweek writers is that he “could erode American democracy and sovereignty” by supporting adherence to international law. They ridicule the notion of universal jurisdiction for war crimes. But Thomas and Taylor miss some fundamental points, starting with the fact that no nation historically has been a more enthusiastic or aggressive advocate of universal jurisdiction than the United States, a point reinforced yesterday when a Somali teenager was hauled before a federal court in New York for acts of piracy. The prohibitions on piracy and the enforcement of the laws of war are the historical lynchpins of the universal jurisdiction concept.
More from Scott Horton:
Conversation — August 5, 2016, 12:08 pm
Sidney Blumenthal on the origins of the Republican Party, the fallout from Clinton’s emails, and his new biography of Abraham Lincoln
Conversation — March 30, 2016, 3:44 pm
Joseph Hickman discusses his new book, The Burn Pits, which tells the story of thousands of U.S. soldiers who, after returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, have developed rare cancers and respiratory diseases.
Amonth after Donald Trump took office, an activist named Lana Lokteff delivered a speech calling on women to join the political resistance. “Be loud,” Lokteff said in a crisp, assertive voice. “Our enemies have become so arrogant that they count on our silence.”
Lokteff, who is in her late thirties, addressed an audience of a few hundred people seated in a room with beige walls, drab lighting, and dark-red curtains. The location, a building in the historic Södermalm neighborhood of Stockholm, Sweden, had been secured only the previous night, after several other venues had refused to host the event, billed as an “ideas” conference. Lokteff wore a white blouse and a crocheted black shawl over her trim figure, with a microphone headset fitted over her long blond hair. In addition to the attendees seated before her, she spoke to viewers watching a livestream. “When women get involved,” she declared, “a movement becomes a serious threat.”
There were no civilian cars on the streets of Mosul, Iraq, last December, when the veteran war photographer Don McCullin and I hitched a ride in an Iraqi Army pickup. A few children smiled and flashed V signs at us, but the adults’ stares betrayed hostility or, at best, caution. If Islamic State fighters returned, anyone seen consorting with the army would be punished.
The soldiers took us to an abandoned house in Hay Tahrir (“Liberation Quarter”), a working-class neighborhood in the northeast. Islamic State fighters had only recently been expelled from the area. A blanket was tacked up over the doorway, and daylight came in through the mortar holes in the walls. We dropped onto the dirty floor, folding our legs bedouin-style. The soldiers offered us tea, which had been brewing on a gas burner.
The Iraqis asked McCullin how old he was. Eighty-one, he said. Did he have children? Four boys and a girl. One soldier asked permission to marry his daughter. McCullin told him he couldn’t afford the dowry. After more banter, the soldiers agreed to let us stay the night and go with them to the front in the morning.
The bright-green hulk of our John Deere combine harvester crept across the field of soybeans. It was late in the day, early October, the sun low. A cloud of hulls and chaff spewed from the back of the combine, then swirled up around us and blazed in the glow. Sealed in the dustless quiet of the cab, Rick Hammond steadied the wheel with one hand and punched coordinates into a touchscreen computer with the other. The reel of the harvester head spun steadily below us like the paddle wheel of a river steamer, standing up stalks so that the toothed blades could cut a dozen rows at a go. The feed auger corkscrewed the cut plants into the mouth of the combine, where a throbbing set of threshers splintered the dry pods, collecting the oily seeds inside and sending them spiraling up to the grain tank behind Rick’s chair. Harvested beans ticked against the back window like a light summer hail. The only other sounds were the Pong-like beeps from the computer.
When I came into the kitchen, Ward was using a knife to help his wife, Irene, peel the skin from two buffalo tongues. The skin was discarded in a small heap along with the glutinous veins cut from the undersides, then Ward left it to Irene to cut the meat into cubes. He pulled out a chair opposite me at the table in the dining area and opened up a John Deere repair manual, which was my reason for being there, and began thumbing through it. Meanwhile, Irene put the cubes into a cast-iron Dutch oven and seared them. She added butter, garlic, onion, white wine, and spices, causing me to grow alert to aromas. Besides garlic and onion, I picked out the scents of rosemary, oregano, and something else I couldn’t identify. A pressure cooker slowly heated up on a back burner, and on the counter beside Irene stood ranks of quart mason jars.
Irene turned down the heat under the Dutch oven, placed a lid on it, moved out of the cooking area to a niche in the wall, and sat on a stool. She wiped her hands on her apron and reached up to the back of her head, adjusting the clip on her bun.
Number of “real close personal friends” on President Bush’s computerized list of correspondents:
Women eat twice as many chocolate kisses when they are kept in a clear container on their desks than when they are in opaque containers.
Trump then tweeted that because of the cost of health care for transgender soldiers he would ban them from serving in the U.S. military, which spends an estimated ten times as much on medications that treat erectile dysfunction.
"It is an interesting and somewhat macabre parlor game to play at a large gathering of one’s acquaintances: to speculate who in a showdown would go Nazi. By now, I think I know. I have gone through the experience many times—in Germany, in Austria, and in France. I have come to know the types: the born Nazis, the Nazis whom democracy itself has created, the certain-to-be fellow-travelers. And I also know those who never, under any conceivable circumstances, would become Nazis."
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