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HavenWorks.com/law/war-crimes-act - War Crimes Act Law News |
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 John
Yoo
War Crimes Act "The law's legislative sponsor is one of the House's most conservative members, [North Carolina Republican Representative] Rep. Walter B. Jones Jr. (R-N.C.). He proposed it after a chance meeting with a retired Navy pilot who had spent six years in the notorious "Hanoi Hilton," a Vietnamese prison camp. The conversation left Jones angry about Washington's inability to prosecute the pilot's abusers." ... "Jones's legislation for the first time imposed criminal penalties in the United States for breaches of the Geneva Conventions, which protect detainees anywhere. The Defense Department's deputy general counsel at the time declared at the sole hearing on it in 1996 -- attended by just two lawmakers -- that "we fully support the purposes of the bill," and urged its expansion to cover a wider range of war crimes. The Republican-controlled House passed the bill by voice vote, and the Senate approved it by unanimous consent." ... "The law initially criminalized grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions but was amended without a hearing the following year to include violations of Common Article 3, the minimum standard requiring that all detainees be treated "humanely." The article bars murder, mutilation, cruel treatment, torture and "outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment." It applies to any abuse involving U.S. military personnel or "nationals."" Slate: "Attorney General Alberto Gonzales recently told Congress that terms like "inhuman" and "outrages upon personal dignity" are "inherently vague," and that there were "unacceptable" risks of spurious prosecutions under the War Crimes Act."  Alberto
Gonzales
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 War
Crimes Act
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"China Inspired Interrogations at Guantánamo." ... "The military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay [Cuba] in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of “coercive management techniques” for possible use on prisoners, including “sleep deprivation,” “prolonged constraint,” and “exposure.”" ... "What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners." ... "The recycled chart is the latest and most vivid evidence of the way Communist interrogation methods that the United States long described as torture became the basis for interrogations both by the military at the base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and by the Central Intelligence Agency." ... "Some methods were used against a small number of prisoners at Guantánamo before 2005, when Congress banned the use of coercion by the military. The C.I.A. is still authorized by [Republican] President Bush to use a number of secret “alternative” interrogation methods." ... "Several Guantánamo documents, including the chart outlining coercive methods, were made public at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing June 17 that examined how such tactics came to be employed." ... "But committee investigators were not aware of the chart’s source in the half-century-old journal article, a connection pointed out to The New York Times by an independent expert on interrogation who spoke on condition of anonymity." ... "The 1957 article from which the chart was copied was entitled “Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions From Air Force Prisoners of War” and written by Alfred D. Biderman, a sociologist then working for the Air Force, who died in 2003. Mr. Biderman had interviewed American prisoners returning from North Korea, some of whom had been filmed by their Chinese interrogators confessing to germ warfare and other atrocities." ... "Those orchestrated confessions led to allegations that the American prisoners had been “brainwashed,” and provoked the military to revamp its training to give some military personnel a taste of the enemies’ harsh methods to inoculate them against quick capitulation if captured." ... "In 2002, the training program, known as SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape, became a source of interrogation methods both for the C.I.A. and the military. In what critics describe as a remarkable case of historical amnesia, officials who drew on the SERE program appear to have been unaware that it had been created as a result of concern about false confessions by American prisoners." ... "The only change made in the chart presented at Guantánamo was to drop its original title: “Communist Coercive Methods for Eliciting Individual Compliance.”" (1, 2) -By Scott Shane -NYTimes PDF Documents via NYTimes: "Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions From the Air Force Prisoners of War (pdf) [September 1957 article by A. D. Biderman, Bull, N.Y. Acad. Med, Vol. 33, No.9, pp 616-625. 10 pages. NB: p. 4 (619), Communist Coercive Methods for Eliciting Individual Compliance]." "Documents Released at Senate Armed Services Committee Hearing on SERE Tactics (pdf)."
War
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Bay - Cuba
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"General who probed Abu Ghraib says [Republican President] Bush officials committed war crimes." ... "The Army general who led the investigation into prisoner abuse at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison accused the [Republican President] Bush administration Wednesday of committing "war crimes" and called for those responsible to be held to account." ... "The remarks by [Major General] Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, who's now retired, came in a new report that found that [United States] U.S. personnel tortured and abused detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, using beatings, electrical shocks, sexual humiliation and other cruel practices." ... ""After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes," Taguba wrote. "The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account."" ... "Taguba, whose 2004 investigation documented chilling abuses at Abu Ghraib, is thought to be the most senior official to have accused the administration of war crimes. "The commander in chief and those under him authorized a systematic regime of torture," he wrote." ... "The group Physicians for Human Rights, which compiled the new report, described it as the most in-depth medical and psychological examination of former detainees to date." ... "Also this week, a probe by the Senate Armed Services Committee revealed how senior Pentagon officials pushed for harsher interrogation methods over the objections of top military lawyers. Those methods later surfaced in Afghanistan and Iraq." -By Warren P. Strobel -McClatchyDC.com 
Special
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"Guantanamo Bay detainees investigation." ... "An eight-month McClatchy investigation of the detention system created after the [September] Sept. 11 terrorist attacks has found that the [United States] U.S. imprisoned innocent men, subjected them to abuse, stripped them of their legal rights and allowed Islamic militants to turn the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba into a school for jihad." 
Torture
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Bay - Cuba
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Crimes - Politics
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"Broken Laws, Broken Lives: Medical Evidence of Torture by the US." ... "About: Broken Laws, Broken Lives shows the human consequences of harsh and unlawful US interrogation practices. This landmark report reveals the excruciating pain and continued suffering of men who, never charged with any crime, endured torture at US detention facilities in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantánamo Bay [Cuba]. Based on internationally accepted standards for clinical assessment of torture claims, the report documents practices used to bring about long-lasting pain, terror, humiliation, and shame for months on end." -Physicians for Human Rights -BrokenLives.info
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"Criminal, Immunize Thyself: The Bush administration's get out of jail card for torturers." ... "If the Bush administration is still good at anything, it's this: distracting its opponents and seizing little victories from what might have been big defeats." ... "Take the administration's recent efforts to respond to the Supreme Court's decision in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld. Hamdan arose from a challenge to the president's authority to create novel military commissions to try Guantanamo [Cuba] detainees. In June, the court found these commissions were unlawful: Among other problems, their procedures were inconsistent with existing statutes and fell short of "fair trial" guarantees in the 1949 Geneva Conventions. (Defendants could, for instance, be convicted based on evidence they would never see.)" ... "The decision was, of course, a major defeat for the Bush administration. Not surprisingly, administration officials went back to Congress this month with legislation that would authorize military commissions to pass Supreme Court muster." ... "But now, as recently reported by the Washington Post, the administration is also trying to use Hamdan to pass legislation that would immunize government personnel for abuses against detainees at Guantanamo, in Afghanistan, and in Iraq, including those abuses it authorized. In other words, in the middle of what should be a post-Hamdan debate about how to provide fair trials for those accused of terrorist activities, the administration is simultaneously trying to decriminalize its own past crimes." -By John Sifton -Slate  WATCH
- Noteworthy
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Crimes - US
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Election
"Mr. President, the war isn’t about you — or golf: Olbermann: [Republican President] Bush's claim he gave up game to honor dead GIs is ludicrous." ... "President Bush has resorted anew to the sleaziest fear-mongering and mass manipulation of an administration and public life dedicated to realizing the lowest of our expectations. And he has now applied these poisons to the 2008 presidential election, on behalf of the party at whose center he and [Republican Candidate] John McCain lurk." ... "Mr. Bush has predicted that the election of a Democratic president could "eventually lead to another attack on the United States." This ludicrous, infuriating, holier-than-thou and most importantly bone-headedly wrong statement came during a May 13 interview with Politico.com and online users of Yahoo." ... "The question was phrased as follows: "If we were to pull out of Iraq next year, what's the worst that could happen, what's the doomsday scenario?"" ... "The president replied: "Doomsday scenario of course is that extremists throughout the Middle East would be emboldened, which would eventually lead to another attack on the United States. The biggest issue we face is, it's bigger than Iraq, it's this ideological struggle against cold-blooded killers who will kill people to achieve their political objectives."" ... "Mr. Bush, at long last, has it not dawned on you that the America you have now created, includes "cold-blooded killers who will kill people to achieve their political objectives?" They are those in — or formerly in — your employ, who may yet be charged some day with war crimes." ... "Through your haze of self-congratulation and self-pity, do you still have no earthly clue that this nation has laid waste to Iraq to achieve your political objectives? "This ideological struggle," Mr. Bush, is taking place within this country." ... "It is a struggle between Americans who cherish freedom, ours and everybody else's, and Americans like you, sir, to whom freedom is just a brand name, just like "Patriot Act" is a brand name or "Protect America" is a brand name." ... "But wait, there's more: You also said "Iraq is the place where al-Qaida and other extremists have made their stand and they will be defeated." They made no "stand" in Iraq, sir, you allowed them to assemble there!" ... "As certainly as if that were the plan, the borders were left wide open by your government's farcical post-invasion strategy of "they'll greet us as liberators." And as certainly as if that were the plan, the inspiration for another generation of terrorists in another country was provided by your government's farcical post-invasion strategy of letting the societal infra-structure of Iraq dissolve, to be replaced by an American viceroy, enforced by merciless mercenaries who shoot unarmed Iraqis and then evade prosecution in any country by hiding behind your skirts, sir." ... "Terrorism inside Iraq is your creation, Mr. Bush!" ... "Then came Mr. Bush's final blow to our nation's solar plexus, his last reopening of our common wounds, his last remark that makes the rest of us question not merely his leadership or his judgment but his very suitably to remain in office." ... ""Mr. President," he was asked, "you haven't been golfing in recent years. Is that related to Iraq?"" ... ""Yes," began perhaps the most startling reply of this nightmarish blight on our lives as Americans on our history. "It really is. I don't want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the Commander in Chief playing golf. I feel I owe it to the families to be as — to be in solidarity as best as I can with them. And I think playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal."" ... "Golf, sir? Golf sends the wrong signal to the grieving families of our men and women butchered in Iraq? Do you think these families, Mr. Bush, their lives blighted forever, care about you playing golf? Do you think, sir, they care about you?" ... "You, Mr. Bush, let their sons and daughters be killed. Sir, to show your solidarity with them you gave up golf? Sir, to show your solidarity with them you didn't give up your pursuit of this insurance-scam, profiteering, morally and financially bankrupting war." ... "Sir, to show your solidarity with them you didn't even give up talking about Iraq, a subject about which you have incessantly proved without pause or backwards glance, that you may literally be the least informed person in the world?" ... "Sir, to show your solidarity with them, you didn't give up your presidency? In your own words "solidarity as best as I can" is to stop a game? That is the "best" you can do?" ... "Four thousand Americans give up their lives and your sacrifice was to give up golf!" ... "The great Bushian sacrifice — an Army private loses a leg, a Marine loses half his skull, 4,000 of their brothers and sisters lose their lives — and you lose golf, and they have to pull you off the golf course to get you to just do that?" ... "If it's even true." ... "... CBS News has records of you playing golf as late as [October] Oct. 13 of that year, nearly two months later [two months after Bush claimed that he had given up golf "in solidarity" with the families of American troops.]." (1, 2, 3, 4) -By Keith Olbermann -MSNBC |
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- "John
Yoo's war crimes." ... "As the result of a FOIA [Freedom
of Information Act] lawsuit the ACLU [American Civil Liberties Union] filed
and then prosecuted for several years, numerous documents relating
to the [Republican President] Bush administration's torture regime that
have long been baselessly kept secret were released yesterday, including
an 81-pagememorandum
(.pdf) issued in 2003 by then-Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo
(currently a Berkeley [California] Law Professor) which asserted that the
President's war powers entitle him to ignore multiple laws which criminalized
the use of torture:"[""It depends on why the President thinks he needs to do that." Yoo wasn't just a law professor theorizing about the legalization of torture. He was a government official who, in concert with other government officials, set out to enable a brutal and systematic torture regime, and did so." ... "Since the Nuremberg Trials, "war criminals" include not only those who directly apply the criminal violence and other forms of brutality, but also government officials who authorized it and military officials who oversaw it. Ironically, the Bush administration itself argued in the 2006 case of Hamdan -- when they sought to prosecute as a "war criminal" a Guantanamo detainee whom they allege was a driver for Osama bin Laden -- that one is guilty of war crimes not merely by directly violating the laws of war, but also by participating in a conspiracy to do so." ... "That legal question was unresolved in that case, but Justices Thomas and Scalia both sided with the administration and Thomas wrote (emphasis added):"
""[T]he experience of our wars," Winthrop 839, is rife with evidence that establishes beyond any doubt that conspiracy to violate the laws of war is itself an offense cognizable before a law-of-war military commission. . . . . In [World War II], the orders establishing the jurisdiction of military commissions in various theaters of operation provided that conspiracy to violate the laws of war was a cognizable offense. See Letter, General Headquarters, United States Army Forces, Pacific (Sept. 24, 1945), Record in Yamashita v. Styer, O. T. 1945, No. 672, pp. 14, 16 (Exh. F) (Order respecting the "Regulations Governing the Trial of War Criminals" provided that "participation in a common plan or conspiracy to accomplish" various offenses against the law of war was cognizable before military commissions).""It isn't pleasant to think about high government officials in one's own country as war criminals -- that's something that only bad, evil dictatorships have -- but, pleasant or not, it rather indisputably happens to be what we have." ... "Yoo wasn't acting as a lawyer in order legally to analyze questions surrounding interrogation powers. He was acting with the intent to enable illegal torture and used the law as his instrument to authorize criminality." -By Glenn Greenwald -Salon
John
C Yoo - Criminal
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War
Crimes - Military
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Drugs
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Foreign
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- History
- "Memo:
Laws Didn't Apply to Interrogators: Justice Dept.
[Department] Official in 2003 Said President's Wartime Authority Trumped
Many Statutes." ... "The Justice Department sent a legal memorandum to
the Pentagon in 2003 asserting that federal laws prohibiting assault, maiming
and other crimes did not apply to military interrogators who questioned
al-Qaeda captives because the president's ultimate authority as commander
in chief overrode such statutes." ... "The 81-page memo, which was declassified
and released publicly yesterday, argues that poking, slapping or shoving
detainees would not give rise to criminal liability. The document also
appears to defend the use of mind-altering drugs that do not produce "an
extreme effect" calculated to "cause a profound disruption of the senses
or personality."" ... "Although the existence of the memo has long been
known, its contents had not been previously disclosed." ... "Nine months
after it was issued, Justice Department officials told the Defense Department
to stop relying on it. But its reasoning provided the legal foundation
for the Defense Department's use of aggressive interrogation practices
at a crucial time, as captives poured into military jails from Afghanistan
and U.S. [United States] forces prepared to invade Iraq." ... "Sent to
the Pentagon's general counsel on March 14, 2003, by John C. Yoo, then
a deputy in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, the memo
provides an expansive argument for nearly unfettered presidential power
in a time of war. It contends that numerous laws and treaties forbidding
torture or cruel treatment should not apply to U.S. interrogations in foreign
lands because of the president's inherent wartime powers." ... ""If a government
defendant were to harm an enemy combatant during an interrogation in a
manner that might arguably violate a criminal prohibition, he would be
doing so in order to prevent further attacks on the United States by the
al Qaeda terrorist network," Yoo wrote. "In that case, we believe that
he could argue that the executive branch's constitutional authority to
protect the nation from attack justified his actions."" ... "Interrogators
who harmed a prisoner would be protected by a "national and international
version of the right to self-defense," Yoo wrote. He also articulated a
definition of illegal conduct in interrogations -- that it must "shock
the conscience" -- that the [Republican President] Bush administration
advocated for years." ... ""Whether conduct is conscience-shocking turns
in part on whether it is without any justification," Yoo wrote, explaining,
for example, that it would have to be inspired by malice or sadism before
it could be prosecuted." ... "Thomas J. Romig, who was then the Army's
judge advocate general, said yesterday after reading the memo that it appears
to argue there are no rules in a time of war, a concept Romig found "downright
offensive."" (1, 2)
-By Dan Eggen and Josh White with contributions by
Julie Tate -WashingtonPost
Gordon
England - Secret
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Election - 2006
Election - Osama
bin Laden
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Michael
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John
McCain
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