Resolved: sue the bastids!

It's at times like this. when  the latest news from Iraq and Afghanistan streams across like an acid nightmare, that I think gratefully of  New York lawyer Peter Weiss. 

To look at Weiss, in his sleek office where he works at a multinational corporation, you'd take him for a calmy brilliant  white-shoe lawyer carving every dime they can get out of the competition.The impression remains as he  looks up, and smiles, and shakes your hand, Central Park serving as backdrop.

Until he tells you about how he once almost sued a general, for the massacre at My Lai.

“We even had a plaintiff,” says Weiss; “Vo Thi Thien -- a a young survivor of the massacre -- was living with relatives in Thailand.”

Weiss is now, still, vice president of the Center for Constitutional Rights - the same group of dedicated lawyers that helped him plan the suit against the architect of the U.S. war against Vietnam. The Center had already cut its teeth on civil rights litigation and survived siege at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. Now, it pained them – particularly Weiss, an Army veteran who’d served in military intelligence in World War II --  to watch as a pair of relatively low-ranking, if culpable, officers were blamed for the deaths of 500 Vietnamese villagers, even as they implemented the “scorched-earth” policy openly promoted by that war’s generals.   

And Weiss had found a basis to bring the case into an American courtroom: the Alien Torts Claim Act, a 1789 law that allows for a “civil action by an alien for a tort only, committed in violation of the law of nations or a treaty of the United States.” Although, the North Vietnamese government “decided they didn’t want to be in American courts in the middle of a war," the Act then  became a core element of human rights law, after the Center used it to go after a Paraguayan torturer in 1980.

The 1789 law is also now front and center of at least three suits against Rumsfeld. One, in U.S. federal court, was filed last month by the ACLU and Human Rights First (with the Center as co-counsel) on behalf of a handful of Abu Ghraib survivors.

Weiss is a lead counsel on the other: the decision to look  for redress beyond our borders, to ask for help to revive  the birthplace of the Bill of Rights.

Given that the architects of Gitmo and Abu Ghraib have been not rebuked, but promoted -- Gonzales to AG, Generals Miller and Sanchez adding stars, Jay Bybee a seat on the federal bench --- the Center  took the logic of Weiss' My Lai suit and ran it in the opposite direction. As discussed in this space before, Weiss and the Center have asked Germany's chief prosecutor, under the "universal jurisdiction" principle encoded in their law in 2002, to prosecute Rumsfeld, Gonzales, and a dozen generals, some of whom are conveniently serving at bases in Germany right now. (One of those, General Sanchez, wrote a newly released memo "authorizing harsh tactics" while  "scrutinizing" to ensure reliance with Geneva. On his own, without consulting or traijning anyone in the fine distinctions he saw that no one else did. Do I hear that buck sliding to an incomplete pause? Will the trial, if it happens, be at Nurnberg?). Desperate measures, indeed. But these are desperate times. PBU11

I find myself drafting a Congressional resolution:

Whereas the ordeal of Maher Arar, along with facts about others subject to "extraordinary rendition" -- including the Gulf Stream jet that hauled so many in first-class comfort to their torture locales, one of whose operators sometime forgot to cover up the Boston Red Sox logo-- is documented more every day;

Whereas  the dimensions of the gulags in Iraq Afghanistan become  every day more surreally clear, thanks to the Freedom of Information Act -- with revelations about systemic torture, of detainees, many of whom have no link whatever to terrorism, about  beatings so  harsh they turned  a man's leg to pulp and have  caused over 100 acknowledged deaths, ;

Whereas Alberto Gonzales, Condoleeza Rice and Donald Rumsfeld continue to condemn torture while continuing to assert the prerogative to conceal all information about its treatment of detainees ( as in Arar's case) on the grounds of secrecy and "national security," ,and (according to Human Rights First) have resumed" classifying virtually all information related to U.S. detentions in Afghanistan, including the number of detainees held and the specific legal basis for their detentions";

It is resolved that desperate measures are necessary.

If not a new Nurnberg, then an appeal from Arar to the International Criminal Court is in order -- as a citizen of Canada, which is a signatory to the ICC, he can make the request.  Yes, it would fulfull all of John Bolton's worst predictions about the Court -- but if the Bush Administration doesn't want to be treated like Pol Pot, like Milosevic, then it shouldn't act like them, or evoke Stalin with this network of secret prisons. 

At the very least, the U.S. Congress should leave off its Schiavo necrophilia and appoint, as has been demanded by every group working on this, a special prosecutor to look into these abuses.

Twenty-five years after My Lai, Peter Weiss and his wife, Cora, went back to Vietnam and visited with Vo Thi Thien and her two  children. “It was a testament,” Weiss says,  to how “life can become livable even after unimaginable tragedies..”  Can we say the same of our republic?