Yesterday morning, I spent a few hours on the complex and interactive site compiled for the World Tribunal on Iraq after their indictment had been handed down. Many of you may have heard Arundhati Roy (jury foreman) summarize the findings:
The Jury defined this war as one of the most unjust in history: ‘The Bush and Blair administrations blatantly ignored the massive opposition to the war expressed by millions of people around the world. They embarked upon one of the most unjust, immoral, and cowardly wars in history. The Anglo-American occupation of Iraq of the last 27 months has led to the destruction and devastation of the Iraqi state and society. Law and order have broken down completely, resulting in a pervasive lack of human security; the physical infrastructure is in shambles; the health care delivery system is a mess; the education system has ceased to function; there is massive environmental and ecological devastation; and, the cultural and archeological heritage of the Iraqi people has been desecrated.’
On the basis of the preceding findings and recalling the Charter of the United Nations and other legal documents, the jury has established the following charges against the Governments of the US and the UK:
• Planning, preparing, and waging the supreme crime of a war of aggression in contravention of the United Nations Charter and the Nuremberg Principles.
• Targeting the civilian population of Iraq and civilian infrastructure
• Using disproportionate force and indiscriminate weapon systems
• Failing to safeguard the lives of civilians during military activities and during the occupation period thereafter
• Using deadly violence against peaceful protestors
• Imposing punishments without charge or trial, including collective punishment
• Subjecting Iraqi soldiers and civilians to torture and cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment
• Re-writing the laws of a country that has been illegally invaded and occupied
• Willfully devastating the environment
• Actively creating conditions under which the status of Iraqi women has seriously been degraded
• Failing to protect humanity’s rich archaeological and cultural heritage in Iraq
• Obstructing the right to information, including the censoring of Iraqi media
• Redefining torture in violation of international law, to allow use of torture and illegal detentionsThe Jury also established charges against the Security Council of United Nations for failing to stop war crimes and crimes against humanity among other failures, against the Governments of the Coalition of the Willing for collaborating in the invasion and occupation of Iraq, against the Governments of Other Countries for allowing the use of military bases and air space and providing other logistical support, against Private Corporations for profiting from the war, against the Major Corporate Media for disseminating deliberate falsehoods and failing to report atrocities.
The indictment of the Security Council is particularly interesting, given that the United Nations proper just had a milestone birthday -- one that everyone ignored. And that this proceeding might be said to belong in the building on First Avenue.
If I still lived in San Francisco, it might not have felt so much
like the anniversary was just a whisper.
The SF Chronicle, which since my departure in 2000 seems to have
reconstituted itself as a real newspaper, published what looks (online)
to have been a fold-out special on it (one sample feature here) last week. But even there, I bet it would have been superseded by Gay Pride Week -- rendering quite secondary the sixthieth birthday of the United Nations.
Here in the city that has been the U.N.'s home for over half a century, you'd never know it was happening: the Times, which covered only Bush's absence and ran the same AP piece as everyone else, gave far more play toKarl Rove's comments Friday night (the subject of my last blog) than to this milestone: that sixty years ago, nations of the world decided that working together was no longer a good idea: it was obligatory.
It's still a controversial idea, especially in Bush's America, where
"working together" is most often interpreted as "you work for me"
(cf. Iraq, CAFTA, extraordinary rendition). It does appear, thank goodness, that this is beginning to break down all over -- with the "Shrinking Coalition of the Arm-Twisted" in Iraq, unapproved or uncertain election results from Venezuela to Iran to Bolivia, and the best news about rendition I've heard since I learned the term last year: Italian judges defying their own country's intelligence services to issue a warrant for CIA agents who used Italy as a staging point for a rendition, adding to inquiries by Germany and Sweden (thanks to the always-invaluable Jeanne
for the pointer to the Post's inclusion of all three).
While the office of Luis Moreno Ocampo, chief prosecutor of the ICC, is rather busy investigating Darfur, may end up benefiting from these investigations should they fail. Not least because all three countries are signatories to the Rome Statute, which carefully gives countries every chance they can muster to show they can handle a crime before the international institution kicks in. But with Germany and Italy, two countries that knews Fascism in an earlier wave and likely see the neocon version more clearly than we do, starting to kick up dust in the name of their own sovereignty, we may see either the end of the grand agreement of 1945 -- or, we can only hope, a slow build of support for the international institutions that have developed since. The Chronicle article I linked to above even found Americans, too, see the possible need for more internationalism.
But let's start, for this administration, with baby steps. And no attachment parenting this time -- this is straight-up, no-compromises Pavlovian tough love. If you can't play nice with others, Dick and George, we'll just have to take your playhouse away.
Yes, I'm talking about Guantanamo.
After Cheney bragged that journalists and UN officials were welcome any time, four of the latter came forward to complain about a request that had been stalled since January 2004. Get the Keystone Kops tone here:
Two U.S. government agencies appeared to point the finger at each other.
A Defense Department spokesman said the State Department would be responsible for responding to the request.
The Defense Department's spokesman also said representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross have visited and checked on detainees at Guantanamo Bay and will continue to do so under the Geneva Conventions. Adam Ereli, deputy spokesman for the State Department, said the department has been working with U.N. representatives.
"We have met with them, we have talked with them, we have provided them information," Ereli said. "We have been engaged regularly and consistently to ... respond to their requests for information, to engage with them and to help facilitate their work."
But, he said, "as far as the specifics of this request go, and as far as arranging the visit, and what's involved there, and what considerations are in play, and why it has taken a year, I refer you to the Defense Department."
Perhaps the reason for stalling is the bios of those wanting to get in.
The four human rights experts named in the statement are:
Leandro Despouy, representative on the independence of judges and lawyers. Paul Hunt, representative on the right to health. Manfred Nowak, representative on torture and other cruel treatment or punishment. Leila Zerrougui, chairperson and representative of the working group on arbitrary detention.
Who knows what this crowd might actually want to include in yet another report to be spun? They might not be as willing as Hawaiian Congressman Edward Case to go by their initial guided tour:
His 16-member congressional delegation also freely questioned the prison's guards and saw detainees kept in a lower-level security camp.
He says the prison is being operated in a way that is necessary to the safety and security of the United States in a way that is humane under the circumstances.
He says what he saw didn't match claims by Amnesty International and detainee attorneys.
Similar statements came from Fort Bragg's Congressman, Robin Hayes, who said "No way we're getting BS information." Hayes will, of course, be at the President's speech today. (I will blessedly be on public transport after teaching a creative writing class, and therefore not feel guilty for missing it.)
Did any of Case and Hayes's peoplespeak Arabic, even for the "lower-level detainees?" They likely didn't read the numerous testimonies describing the multi-level, Dantean hierarchy of Guantanamo: this composite statement of Shafiq Rasul, Asif Iqbal and Rhuhel Ahmed cites about as many levels as Aligheri's, from Camp Shebergan to Camp Delta, Camp Echo, Camp Oscar...and within them numerous blocks - some, and the worst, were "intel blocks." You'd think they'd at least have picked up a copy of Inside the Wire to read on the plane, so they could tell the difference - or at least so that their statements didn't have so explicitlt the smell of whitewash.
Still, it hardly matters. Those visits, however savvy the aides, don't substitute for letting the UN experts do the investigating they're trained to do. While courts continue to poke holes in the "law-free" nature of your playpen, boys, you have to let grownups in to assess the damage.
I titled this post "What we owe them" with the intent of making the latter pronoun as capacious as possible. We owe it to the detainees, certainly -- even those who would see me dead. We owe it to the human rights organizations and brave military personnel who have stepped forward to stand on the side of truth and justice, whether it's Amnesty, CCR, Inside the Wire's Saar, or Col. Will Gunn, who demanded that the job of defense counsel at Gitmo be real.
And perhaps most of all, we owe it to the people who sat around at that table in San Francisco in 1945, many of whom had just washed their faces from the dust of the concentration camps, and decided not to give up on the world. Let's pray that their decision, back then, to trust the United States as the home of the U.N. was not a horrible mistake.
PBU127
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