Month: April 2012

David Bosco interviews the president of the International Criminal Court, Judge Sang-Hyun Song. He is elected by ICC judges, “oversees the operations of the court and often represents the institution internationally.” Song here responds to criticism that the ICC targets weaker countries and lets the powerful commit their crimes in peace (no pun intended):

I don’t think the ICC has deliberately targeted weaker, poorer African countries. In my view, what is being targeted is not any country, what is being targeted is impunity, which is more rampant in that particular continent than any other part of the world.

How could the U.S. political system embody impunity any more than it already does? The litany of high crimes is too lengthy for me to catalogue here, but suffice it to say that the ICC has little legitimacy in my mind until it decides to investigation the Bush administration for war crimes.

Today in the news section I wrote about the just-released secret memo written in 2006 by then-State Department Counselor Philip Zelikow in which he argues that so-called “enhanced interrogation” violates the Constitutional ban on “cruel and unusual punishment,” violates the Geneva Conventions, and violates a special 2005 law which specifically prohibited the use of these techniques on “enemy combatants.” In other words, and in the words of Zelikow himself, the Bush administration committed war crimes in their systematic use of torture against detainees in Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and beyond.

All kinds of horrible war crimes were committed throughout the Bush administration. On weak and falsified evidence, the Bush administration took the United States to war against a non-threatening Iraq. This makes it a war of aggression, which in the words of the Nuremberg Trial is the “supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.” This crime directly contributed to the death of many hundreds of thousands of people, yet the ICC is currently pursuing a warrant for Gadhafi’s son, Saif al-Islam (no doubt a criminal, but let us prioritize, eh?) while Bush administration officials relax in early retirement.

In the names of hundreds of thousands of murdered Iraqis, the ICC sucks.

Update: Two days ago I also wrote about the ICC refusing to investigate Israel for war crimes in its war on Gaza in 2009. Via Electronic Intifada, Michael Mandel, a professor at Osgoode Hall Law School at York University in Toronto comments:

It’s disgraceful but not surprising that the ICC has dismissed Palestine’s complaint against Israel. It sat on the complaint for over three years, always proudly announcing that it was investigating it to give the appearance of impartiality. Meanwhile the ICC jumped to attention in less than three weekswhen the US government, which is not a signatory to the treaty, wanted to go to war against Libya, justifying Western aggression with bogus charges against the Libyan regime.

[Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court Luis Moreno] Ocampo, and company have been busy putting Africa on trial for crimes aided, abetted and exploited by the rich countries, while the US government killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and tens of thousands of Afghans, and Israel has been committing Nuremberg’s ‘supreme international crime’ of aggression against the Palestinians for 45 years.

Via Lawfare, prominent American activists have filed suit arguing that the language in NDAA can be used to detain them for engaging in their “daily professional work.” They include: Christopher Hedges, Daniel Ellsberg, Jennifer Bolen, Noam Chomsky, Alexa O’Brien, U.S. Day of Rage, Kai Wargalla, and the Hon. Brigitta Jonsdottir. The website they’ve set up for their cause is here.

Round One is a group of individuals who have stepped forward because we have reason to believe we face the potential for serious harm under the NDAA. However, while the language of this law is so broad and vague, it could affect anyone. For this reason, In Round Two, we will be opening this lawsuit up to the entire US public and citizens of other nations. Then, you can either sign up to publicly support this lawsuit, or consider becoming an actual plaintiff. We are offering both options because we need to make sure our legal case is as strong as possible. More info soon, so stay tuned!

The plaintiff’s summarize their case:

1. The Act improperly authorizes that civilians in the United States be detained indefinitely by the military, that they be tried by military commission or military court and that they may be subject to removal to other jurisdictions in violation of the Amendments V and VI of the Constitution.
2. The Act fails to give reasonable notice of the acts and conduct that will render a person liable to military detention and is overbroad thereby chilling and impinging upon protexted expressive and associative acts.

The government’s defense is as such:

Plaintiffs’ challenge to section 1021 must be rejected. Properly understood, section 1021 merely restates the detention authority that the government already had under the AUMF. In the statute’s own words, it “affirms” the AUMF’s detention authority while expressly not “expand[ing]” it, and defines those “covered persons” who may be detained in terms no more broad than the government has advanced before the courts—and that the courts have upheld—for years.

Based on their misunderstandings of the law, plaintiffs now purport to fear that they will be subjected to indefinite military detention simply for their political views and expression. But those fears are baseless. Plaintiffs do not assert that they or anyone similarly situated have ever been detained or threatened with detention under the identical preexisting authority provided by the AUMF. Nor can they demonstrate that their subjective fears are reasonable in light of the government’s implementation of its detention authority under the AUMF. For those reasons, plaintiffs lack standing, and therefore are unable to demonstrate a likelihood of success in this action, irreparable harm, or a balance of the equities involved that tips in their favor. Plaintiff’s motion for a preliminary injunction, therefore, should be denied.

See Lawfare if you interested in reading the court documents that have been filed so far.

Army criminal investigators have only now completed their first visit to the crime scene where Staff Sgt. Robert Bales is alleged to have murdered 17 Afghan civilians. They are refusing to make any comment about the evidence they’ve gathered.

This photo gives a small glimpse into what the crime scene used to look like:

See here for a report in which eyewitnesses describe Bales’s violence and claim he did not act alone.

The lawyer representing Bales has recently made public complaints about the U.S. military blocking his own investigation into the case, preventing him from gathering any evidence and from speaking to any of those witnesses.

Some Afghan officials are saying the evidence at the crime scene has been compromised.

Ed Husain, Senior Fellow for Middle Eastern Studies, Council on Foreign Relations:

In the Syrian opposition, it’s no exaggeration to say that there are Saudi Salafis, as well as al-Qaeda elements, and others who are included toward more extreme versions of religiosity present in that conflict. Given that we don’t really know who the Syrian opposition is composed of in detail, how wise is it to then bring down another regime and put in its place yet another Muslim Brotherhood-led government?

Priest from the Syrian district of Hamidiya:

“Some Christians who tried to escape a week ago were stopped from leaving by the rebels and were instead forced to go to a mosque to act as shields,” he said. “They thought that, because Christians support Assad, the government would not attack them.”

In The Crisis of Zionism Peter Beinart catalogues some interesting things about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s father, Benzion Netanyahu, who has been a strong ideological influence on Benjamin.

And in 2009, at the age of ninety-nine, he told the Israeli newspaper Maariv that Israel should retake the Gaza Strip, from which it had withdrawn four years earlier. “We should conquer any disputed territory in the land of Israel,” Netanyahu declared. “Conquer and hold it, even if it brings us years of war…You don’t return land.”

[…] In a 2003 book on Zionism’s founders, he […] described his proposals for relocating the Arabs of Palestine “to Arabia, Iraq, Syria – anywhere – as long as they will get out of the land of Israel,” without a word of criticism. “The Jews and the Arabs are like two goats facing each other on a narrow bridge. One must jump into the river,” Netanyahu told Maariv in 2009. “What does the Arab’s jump mean?” asked the interviewer, trying to decipher the metaphor. Netanyahu explained: “That they won’t be able to face the war with us, which will include withholding food from Arab cities, preventing education, terminating electrical power and more. They won’t be able to exist and they will run away from here.”

Beinart describes the elder Netanyahu’s fundamental policy prescription thusly: “meet any inkling of Palestinian nationalism with brutal violence.” Benjamin Netanyahu has expressed a similar approach, as Beinart records.

What’s amazing is the success in America of the public relations campaign depicting the current Israeli leadership as fair-minded and open to peace but for the rejectionist Palestinians. This is a belief the mainstream sincerely holds, despite the Prime Minister’s Likud Party Charter, which declares Jewish settlement in the West Bank and Gaza as “the realization of Zionist values” and that the whole of the West Bank and Jerusalem belong to Israel (“The Government of Israel flatly rejects the establishment of a Palestinian Arab state west of the Jordan river”).

Nobody should be confused as to why a political settlement has not been forthcoming, especially with full and unquestioned American support of these policies.

Israeli authorities have basically ignored a court order in June 2011 to provide Bedouin communities with water, just as Jewish Israelis are. Electronic Intifada:

Between 80,000 and 90,000 Bedouin citizens of Israel live in unrecognized villages in the southern Negev, according to a report by the Association for Civil Rights in Israel. As a result of their unrecognized status, nearly every structure in these communities can be demolished at any time, and residents do not receive basic services from the state, including electricity, paved roads, healthcare facilities, schools and water.

These are the same groups that Israel recently sued for over $500,000, the claimed costs of demolishing their village each time the Bedouin rebuilt it. Israeli authorities had destroyed, and the Bedouin had rebuilt, the homes in al-Araqib more than 20 times.