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Tag: international law
Crimes Against Humanity On The Border

Crimes Against Humanity On The Border

There may come a time when top officials of the Trump administration, including the president himself, will no longer be able to travel abroad without fear of arrest by international authorities. Every day now, evidence accumulates that Trump and his appointees are perpetrating crimes against humanity on the southern border.

Even Trump’s conscience seems to have been shocked, momentarily, by the wrenching news video of a father and his little daughter drowned in the Rio Grande last Sunday. Or so he wants us to believe. The images of Oscar Alberto Martinez holding his 23-month-old Angie Valeria, their bodies face down in the river, forced the nation’s attention to the terrible effects of his administration’s crackdown. Driven away from safer ports of entry, those innocents perished as the father tried to save his child at a dangerous crossing point.

While Trump’s sadistic approach has failed to discourage migration, he has certainly succeeded in wrecking the international image of the United States. Make America great again? Not since the exposure of torture at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison in 2004 has our reputation sunk so low.

For many months now, the world has looked on our government in horror as the truth has emerged about human caging, family separations and intolerable living conditions inflicted on migrants. With each episode, this situation has grown more intolerable, as we learned that thousands of children have been snatched from their parents and then somehow disappeared, with federal authorities unable to account for their location or condition.

Trump being Trump, he immediately sought to deflect blame onto “the Democrats,” suggesting that his opponents’ humane attitude draws refugees northward at their peril. But by now he knows that his ill treatment of those migrants has done nothing to dissuade them from fleeing violence and starvation in their home countries — a consequence of U.S. foreign policy that predated Trump but that he has only made worse.

The latest damning evidence comes from within Border Patrol facilities near McAllen and Clint, Texas, where a visiting physician and attorneys found kids living without any of the necessities for decent existence. According to Dr. Dolly Lucio Sevier, the minors she examined in those facilities were subjected to “extreme cold temperatures, lights on 24 hours a day, no adequate access to medical care, basic sanitation, water, or adequate food.” They had been unable to bathe or even wash their hands for days, which could lead to outbreaks of illness. Several infants had come down with flu, which sent them to neonatal intensive care in a local hospital. All of these children have suffered trauma, said the doctor, which provoked her to compare their treatment to “torture.”

The lonely voice of sanity on Fox News Channel, anchor Shepard Smith, was moved to point out that the United States is now subjecting migrant children and adults to conditions not permitted for prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions. Which is another way to say that the government is perpetrating crimes against humanity. (When Trump claims that the underlying cause is a lack of funding, remember that he was fully prepared to seize money, constitutionally authorized or not, to build his border wall.)

What drives a government that once stood for something better to commit these acts? The earliest signal was that inflammatory speech delivered by Trump four years ago on the day he declared his presidential candidacy. Demonizing immigrants as rapists and worse, he commenced a campaign of dehumanization that has continued to the present. Since then, this administration’s innate barbarism has been reflected in both policy and personnel, starting with presidential adviser Stephen Miller, whose own family has publicly deplored his cruelty. The incoming chief of Customs and Border Patrol is Mark Morgan, a hardliner who says he can tell whether a minor child will join MS-13, the ultra-violent criminal gang, merely by “looking into their eyes.”

So now the children are to be demonized, too.

When a government intentionally harms a group of civilians through propaganda, policy decisions and physical mistreatment, resulting in the death of innocents and the destruction of families, its officials are committing offenses against both U.S. and international law. That is what is happening today in this country — and someday, those responsible may yet be held to account.

Trump and his associates should stand warned.

To find out more about Joe Conason and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

 

 

The Senate Torture Report: Crimes Without Punishment

The Senate Torture Report: Crimes Without Punishment

With the release of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report on the use of torture by the Central Intelligence Agency after 9/11, the final defense of the indefensible by its perpetrators, advocates, and publicists is falling apart before our eyes.

Not only did “enhanced interrogation,” the Nazi euphemism adopted by the Bush-Cheney administration, employ methods outlawed and prosecuted by our country for more than a century, such as waterboarding; and not only did those “activities,” as Dick Cheney called them, violate American law, the Constitution, the Geneva Conventions, and the conventions on torture; but we now know with great certainty that the agency executed this secret program with horrific incompetence — and that it produced nothing of significant value.

Indeed, the Senate Intelligence report concludes, contrary to the boasting of Cheney and many others, that torture was proved “not an effective means of gathering intelligence,” let alone saving millions of Americans from jihadi plots, and actually “complicated and in some cases impeded the national security missions.” The overseers of the torture program, themselves of dubious competence, were unable even to assess the impact or effectiveness of their orders.

As Micah Zenko of the Council on Foreign Relations points out, the CIA itself has admitted, in its otherwise aggressive response to the SSCI, that it lacked the “structure, expertise, and methodologies” to “systematically evaluate the effectiveness of our covert programs. They literally didn’t know what they were doing. But they were doing grave damage to themselves and to us.

Unavoidably, the Senate Intelligence report dwells on the details of these true nightmares, revealing facts that anyone would regret learning: the “rectal rehydration” of detainees by shoving food up the wrong way, with the infliction of excruciating pain; the “black sites” where detainees were held for months in total darkness, loud music constantly playing, and only a bucket for their waste; the cells where detainees suffered such freezing temperatures that at least one died of hypothermia overnight; the beatings, the near-drownings, the constant infliction of pain, hunger, and threats of rape and murder.

According to the report, some episodes of interrogation were so blatantly sadistic and so obviously criminal that the men who witnessed them actually wept. More than one officer broke down and fled, through retirement or transfer, while the White House and the Pentagon continued to lie about the extent – and the supposed necessity – of these unprecedented crimes. Those lies were designed to prevent investigations or oversight from revealing the horrific facts that are now emerging.

Yet despite a long and ongoing cover-up –and notwithstanding the specific revelations highlighted in the report – the basic outline has been known since 2009, when portions of the CIA inspector general’s report on torture were released by the Obama Justice Department in 2009.

Back then, the spy agency’s own investigation – in the words of a Bush appointee and torture enthusiast — “[found it] difficult to determine conclusively whether interrogations have provided information critical to interdicting specific imminent attacks.” In other words, the agency could never prove any instance when the sole justification for these gross violations of US and international law – breaking up a plot targeting American lives – had been fulfilled since 9/11. And unsurprisingly, that is still the case.

The searing issue we now confront, as a society governed by law, is that these lawbreakers will not be prosecuted or even required to testify publicly about their grave offenses. The Obama administration is apparently willing to expose their lawlessness, but unable to do anything to punish it. Even the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, Anthony Romero, has abandoned any hope of prosecutions, noting that the torturers have in effect been pardoned. Romero has urged President Obama to make those pardons official – which would at least stamp the actions of the torturers and their accomplices as crimes.

What we have needed for years, but evidently will never get, is a truth and reconciliation process that might have granted freedom from prosecution to witnesses who testified publicly, honestly, and completely about the crimes of the Bush administration. Instead, those miscreants will escape accountability altogether – except in the pages of history, where the Senate Intelligence report will indict them over and over again.