You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life - Albert Camus

Saturday, November 24, 2007

I was never a fan of his, but I have to say I agree with this decision.

PARIS (AP)-A Paris prosecutor has thrown out a complaint against former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld for torture in Iraq and at the U.S. military detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, a lawyer for one of the four groups that filed the case said Friday.

The prosecutor dismissed the case on the grounds that Rumsfeld benefits from immunity, said attorney Patrick Baudoin, president of the International Federation of Human Rights. The organizations that brought the complaint have asked the prosecutor to reconsider.

The complaint was filed October 25 during a visit to Paris by Rumsfeld.

Now I have no doubt Rummy knew full well the general specifics of what was going on not just at Guantanamo but also Abu Ghraib. Does this mean that a foreign government has the right to try him, however? This is why I am against the International Criminal Court-there are issues of soveriegnity involved, not to mention that a future President or his advisors could conceivably be brought to trial for legitimate military actions by disgruntled America haters abroad. If Rummy is ever to be held accountable, it should be done in this country, by his own citizens.

Update from Lee: Allow me to play a little devil’s advocate here, just for the sake of discussion.  We have many laws in the United States which allow our citizens to file lawsuits against foreign governments for their actions.  The families of the Pan Am bombing over Scotland in the late 80s, which was ultimately tied to Libya, sued that country.  Here’s a good summary of the point I’m making.

Last month, lawyers and diplomats from the U.S. and Libya finally settled the outstanding lawsuits surrounding the destruction of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988.

The deal guarantees between $5 and $10 million to each of the families of the victims. It also brings to a close a long and painful campaign by plaintiffs who had filed suit against Libya.

The settlement raises a few questions, however, which cannot be ignored.

The History of Earlier Lockerbie Litigation and Diplomacy

First, American law - in particular, the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (FSIA) - protected Libya from civil suit in American courts. Second, because Libya would not extradite the suspected terrorist mastermind behind the bombing, no court had yet concluded that there was a Libyan connection in the first place.

By 2003, the landscape had changed dramatically. The U.S. Congress, under pressure from families of victims of state-sponsored murder around the world, amended the FSIA to permit civil suits against a handful of states that “sponsored” terrorism (such as Cuba, Iran, and Libya). And, in 2001, a Scottish court sitting in the Netherlands convicted a Libyan secret servant agent for the terrorist act (the Libyan government, under intense pressure from the world community, sent him to be tried).

So, it seems that when it is politically expedient for us to do so we will ignore the concept of sovereign immunity in certain situations.  A Scottish court in the Netherlands is an international court, so we clearly have no objection to international courts when it suits our purposes.  Rumsfeld isn’t being sued for his general actions as the head of the DoD, he’s being sued because he oversaw activities (torture, kidnapping, etc.) which are clearly and blatantly illegal under international laws to which the United States is a signatory (and often times the author).  So while I would say that Rumsfeld can and should enjoy immunity for the lawful, recognized activities of his job, there also can and should be limits on that immunity.  For example, if Rumsfeld authorized a bombing campaign as part of the war in Afghanistan, that would be a generally accepted function of the role of the head of the US military.  (Yes, Bush is CiC, but you know what I mean.  He was Secretary of Defense.) However, torture and kidnapping are not general and reasonable functions of a Secretary of Defense, they’re the type of illegal and immoral activities routinely engaged in by Cuba, Iran, and Libya, the countries for whom we created exceptions in the sovereignty rules. 

They’re also routinely engaged in by Syria, the country we sent the Canadian to be tortured in for a year.  If Maher, the Canadian Muslim, had been in the United States illegally, and we tried to deport him to Syria, he could legally challenge his deportation in the grounds that he might reasonably be tortured on his return.  But we specifically sent him there so the Syrians could torture him, and he admitted to everything—being in al Qaeda, meeting OBL, going to Afghanistan to train, and so on.  All of it was a lie, of course, he said it just to get the torture to stop, just like any of us would do. 

Let me put it this way.  Suppose Rumsfeld had ordered his troops to rape women, should he enjoy immunity from prosecution for doing so?  I think most of us would say no.  So why should he be immune from ordering the systematic kidnapping and torture or countless men, many of whom have subsequently been shown to be innocent?  And let us not forget the number of men who died during these “interrogations.” If some police were beating a suspect they had in their custody and he died, they’d be prosecuted.  Remember the Abner Louima case in New York City?

Already struggling to explain the 41-shot fusillade that killed Amadou Diallo, an unarmed Bronx man, the New York Police Department is bracing for another examination of its alleged brutality. On March 29, jury selection began in the federal trial of the five cops indicted in the Abner Louima torture case. Officers Justin Volpe, Charles Schwarz, Thomas Bruder, and Thomas Wiese have been charged with violating Louima’s civil rights for allegedly beating the Haitian immigrant following an August 1997 disturbance outside a Brooklyn nightclub. A fifth cop, Michael Bellomo, has been charged with lying to cover up the incident.

Prosecutors charge that, along with being beaten in a patrol car, Louima was assaulted in a precinct bathroom, where he was held down by Schwarz while Volpe shoved a wooden stick into his rectum.

And the outcome?

A federal court jury in Brooklyn convicted three New York City cops March 6 of conspiring to cover up the 1997 stationhouse torture of Haitian immigrant Abner Louima.

Thomas Weise and Thomas Bruder each face five years in prison on the charge of conspiracy to obstruct a federal investigation into the savage assault on Louima. The third cop, Charles Schwarz, was convicted in a previous trial as an accomplice with Justin Volpe in torturing the immigrant worker inside the bathroom of the 70th Precinct in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn.

Volpe, convicted of sodomizing Louima with a broken piece of a broomstick, tearing a one-inch hole in his rectum and bladder, was sentenced to 30 years in prison. Schwarz, who was found guilty of holding Louima down during the attack, faces up to a life sentence.

Now, it should be noted that the police in this case ultimately had their convictions overturned.  But that is immaterial to the point I am making.  We allowed them to be prosecuted, to stand trial for the crimes alleged against them.  The outcome of the trial is for a judge and/or jury to decide.  It’s the concept of allowing the process to go forward, of holding public servants accountable for their actions, and not giving them a free pass just because they’re on “our side.”

So, let’s look at this in principle.  We have a tradition of holding law enforcement officials legally and criminally accountable for breaking the law.  What these cops did to Louima is fundamentally identical to what Rumsfeld authorized at Abu Ghraib, so the tradition still holds.  (It’s not legally identical, but it’s conceptually identical.) The police were authorized by law to interrogate the suspect, sometimes harshly, but there are limits on how harsh they can go.  The same applies to the treatment of prisoners during wartime, as defined in numerous acts (Geneva Protocols, Human Rights, agreements, Treatment of Prisoners treaties, and so on.) Now, as WVR says, he should ideally be tried in an American court.  But what if the American government refuses to prosecute?  When the Libyan government refused to prosecute the terrorists it was protecting we created legal exceptions to the sovereignty rule so that we could seek justice, thus we have a legal precedent of establishing exceptions to this law.

So, the question up for discussion then is, why shouldn’t a foreign prosecutor be able to seek exceptions in their country to try Rumsfeld in absentia for crimes of which he is clearly guilty, especially when we permit our own government to do exactly the same thing?