Tag: pardons
Republican Activist Behind Pardon Bid For Veterans Charged With War Crimes

Republican Activist Behind Pardon Bid For Veterans Charged With War Crimes

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

David “Bull” Gurfein, head of the United American Patriots, is a Republican activist who has been lobbying on behalf of military veterans accused of war crimes — including Edward Gallagher, the U.S. Navy SEAL court-martialed and charged with premeditated murder for allegedly killing a captured member of ISIS in Iraq. The activities of Gurfein and the United American Patriots are the subject of a new Vice News report.

Gurfein has been encouraging the Trump Administration to pardon Gallagher and other veterans accused of war crimes. In an eight-minute video Vice News has posted on Twitter, Gurfein is seen at an event in honor of Derrick Miller — a National Guard member who killed an unarmed Afghan in 2010. Gurfein is seen welcoming Miller after his release on parole following nine years of detention.

Vice News notes that Gurfein is a retired military veteran who enlisted in the U.S. Marines at 17 and went on to fight in the Persian Gulf War as well as in Afghanistan — and that in the year since he took over United American Patriots, the organization “has raised and spent hundreds of thousands of dollars defending service members accused of crimes in war zones and bringing the cases to the attention of lawmakers with the hopes that they might take them up with President Trump.”

Vice also reports that Gurfein and the United American Patriots have been having some success in lobbying Trump, who in early May, granted clemency to Michael Behenna —a veteran accused of murdering an Iraqi prisoner in 2008.

The video shows Trump, on May 24, declaring that he was “looking at a lot of different pardons for a lot of different people.” But not all military veterans, Vice reports in the video, want to see Trump pardon veterans accused of war crimes.

One of them is attorney Hardy Vieux. Interviewed for Vice’s report, Vieux asserted that granting blanket pardons to veterans accused of war crimes destabilizes military rules and procedures and undermines the military’s integrity. “When the president intervenes,” Vieux told Vice, “it really erodes that good order of discipline.”

In 2016, Gurfein ran for a U.S. House of Representatives seat in New York’s Fourth Congressional District but lost to Democratic incumbent Kathleen Rice.

IMAGE: David Gurfein, Republican activist and executive director of United American Patriots.

War Crimes: Pardons For The Lowly, Free Passes At The Top

War Crimes: Pardons For The Lowly, Free Passes At The Top

Reprinted with permission from TomDispatch.

Memorial Day has come and gone and President Trump did not issue his pardons after all. There was substantial evidence that he was planning to use the yearly moment honoring the country’s war dead to grant executive clemency to several U.S. soldiers and at least one military contractor. All have been accused, and one already convicted, of crimes in the never-ending war on terror. But apparently Trump received enough resistance from serving and retired senior military officers and former soldiers, including presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg, to change his mind — for now.

The Friday before Memorial Day, the president was evidently still undecided but moved, so he told reporters, by his compassion for former fighters who are being “really treated very unfairly.” After all, he explained, “Some of these soldiers are people that have fought hard and long. You know, we teach them how to be great fighters, and then when they fight…” — well, we’re sometimes cruel enough to hold them to the standards set by U.S. and international law. Of course, there are those, including ethics students of mine in the Reserve Officer Training Corps, who might argue that part of the training to be a “great fighter” is learning to obey the laws of war, including, for example, the Geneva Conventions.

Trump has already pardoned one war criminal. On May 6th, he granted full executive clemency to Michael Behenna, convicted in 2009 of murdering an Iraqi prisoner named Ali Mansur Mohammed. Behenna served five years of a 25-year sentence and was paroled in 2014. What did Behenna do to Mansur? Guardian columnist Gary Younge offers some details: “On Mansur’s release Behenna was supposed to take him home, but instead took him to a secluded area, stripped him naked and shot him dead, later claiming Mansur had made a lunge for his gun.” Now, Behenna has a presidential pardon and Ali Mansur Mohammed is still dead.

Who else is in line for a possible pardon? The list includes Nicholas Slatten, a former contractor for Blackwater, twice convicted of murder in federal court for his part in the infamous Nisour Square massacre of 14 civilians in Baghdad in 2007. Blackwater, you may recall, was a mercenary outfit owned until 2010 by Erik Prince, a Trump confidant and the brother of Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos. Also under consideration for pardons:

  • Army Major Matthew Golsteyn, a Green Beret accused of murdering an unarmed Afghan
  • Navy Special Warfare Operator Chief Edward Gallagher, accused among other things of “stabbing a defenseless teenage captive to death, picking off a school-age girl and an old man from a sniper’s roost,” and “indiscriminately spraying neighborhoods [in Mosul, Iraq] with rockets and machine-gun fire,” according to the New York Times

Trump seems to have taken an interest in Gallagher’s case as early as this March, when he tweeted, “In honor of his past service to our Country, Navy Seal #EddieGallagher will soon be moved to less restrictive confinement while he awaits his day in court. Process should move quickly!” For once, Trump wasn’t lying and soon afterwards he ordered the Navy to release the prisoner from the brig while he awaits trial. Gallagher is now merely restricted to his base.

Both military figures and civilians have expressed disgust at Trump’s Memorial Day pardon talk. Some, like Buttigieg, argue that pardons for war crimes endanger those now serving in the military. “If the president blows a hole in” the military justice system, the Democratic candidate for president told the Washington Post, “he is blowing a hole in the military and he is putting troops’ lives at risk” by signaling to adversaries that the United States is not bound by the laws of war, so they needn’t be either.

Other critics point to potential harm to the integrity of the military justice system, which requires that military commanders refrain from seeking to influence ongoing judicial processes. Presumably the category of “military commanders” includes the commander-in-chief. Yet Trump has done just that, most recently by telling reporters he might wait until after the trials are over to consider issuing those pardons, a pretty strong signal to the courts of the outcomes he’d like to see.

Outrageous as these potential and actual pardons may be, even the most outraged of observers continue to avoid a more significant issue: only relatively low-level soldiers and contractors have been held responsible for crimes committed in the war on terror. With all the recent discussion of pardons and war crimes, who’s talking about holding responsible the authors of the policies that put those soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq in the first place? (Or, for that matter, in Syria, Yemen, Niger, or any of the other acknowledged and unacknowledged battlefields in our forever wars?) If the crime is big enough — like creating or countenancing a U.S. torture archipelago that stretched from Thailand to Poland to Guantánamo Bay, or lying to the world to justify launching an aggressive war on Iraq — the risk of trial is nonexistent. No pardons required.

Should pictures surface of you tormenting Iraqis in some foreign prison like Iraq’s Abu Ghraib, as Army reservists Charles Graner and Lynndie Englanddid, you might indeed end up in jail for a while and become the possible object of a presidential pardon. If, however, you’re Major General Geoffrey Miller, who ran the Guantánamo prison for then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld — well, you’re a hero. In 2003, Rumsfeld dispatched Miller from Cuba to take charge of U.S. military prisons in Iraq, especially Abu Ghraib, and to “Gitmo-ize them,” which he certainly did. And if you’re Donald Rumsfeld himself, who approved the use of torture at Guantánamo in an infamous December 2002 memo requested by Miller, you’re an elder statesman and honored philanthropist.

War Crimes and Cover-Ups

Of course, the war on terror isn’t the first American conflict in which higher-ups have escaped responsibility for war crimes. I was only 17 in November 1969, but I still remember when investigative reporter Seymour Hersh broke the story of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam. He recounted the events of a day of horror in March 1968 when a small band of U.S. soldiers, led by Lieutenant William Calley, systematically murdered somewhere between 350 and 570 Vietnamese civilians, all of them old men, women, or children. It would later emerge that, in addition to shoving Vietnamese peasants into ditches and machine gunning them, executing people kneeling outside a temple, setting fire to homes, and shooting people as they ran out to escape the flames, soldiers raped many women and girls.

A witness told Hersh, “They didn’t put up a fight or anything. The women huddled against their children and took it. They brought their kids real close to their stomachs and hugged them, and put their bodies over them trying to save them. It didn’t do much good.”

Alone among the 26 servicemen tried for My Lai, Lieutenant Calley was convicted in 1971 of murder. All the rest were acquitted. Calley was sentenced to life in the military prison at Fort Leavenworth, later reduced to 20 years.  However, in a move that would presage Donald Trump’s order to release Eddie Gallagher, the day after Calley’s conviction, President Richard Nixon arranged for him to be moved to Fort Benning, Georgia, where he lived under house arrest until his parole a mere three-and-a-half years later.

As Nick Turse revealed in the Nation 40 years later, My Lai was no aberration. It was part of a larger operation calledSpeedy Express, conceived at the highest military levels, involving civilian murders committed across a wide swath of South Vietnam’s Mekong Delta. As Turse wrote in 2008:

“From December 1968 through May 1969, a large-scale operation was carried out by the Ninth Infantry Division, with support from nondivision assets ranging from helicopter gunships to B-52 bombers. The offensive, known as Operation Speedy Express, claimed an enemy body count of 10,899 at a cost of only 267 American lives. Although guerrillas were known to be well armed, the division captured only 748 weapons.”

Quoting an anonymous sergeant who in 1970 wrote a 10-page letter to Army Chief of Staff General William Westmoreland, Turse added that

“these killings all took place for one reason: ‘the General in charge and all the commanders, riding us all the time to get a big body count. Nobody ever gave direct orders to “shoot civilians” that I know of, but the results didn’t show any different than if… they had ordered it. The Vietnamese were dead, victims of the body count pressure and nobody cared enough to try to stop it.'”

No one was ever prosecuted for the crimes of Operation Speedy Express and only William Calley was ever convicted for the horrors of My Lai, themselves but one example of what Westmoreland’s anonymous correspondent called, “a My Lay [sic] each month for over a year.” Indeed, the expression “a Lieutenant Calley” came to signify a low-level scapegoat for war crimes ordered (however implicitly) by higher ups who managed to keep their hands — and their legacies — clean of the taint of atrocity.

Of course, no high-ranking officer, cabinet-level official, or U.S. president would ever stand trial for the crimes of the Vietnam War. Not for the extensive use of the incendiary napalm against defenseless civilians; not for the CIA’s infamous Phoenix Program in which between 20,000 and 40,000Vietnamese were murdered (often after being tortured); not for the carpet bombing of parts of North Vietnam and significant parts of South Vietnam; not for the deaths of as many as two million civilians in North and South Vietnam.

Remember Nuremberg?

The United States was not always so reluctant to put national leaders on trial for their war crimes. That’s exactly what this country, along with the other three “Great Powers” of World War II — France, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union — did when they tried high-ranking Nazis and their enablers at Nuremberg.

In his opening remarks at the first Nuremberg trials in 1945, Robert Jackson, the chief prosecutor for the United States (and an associate justice of the Supreme Court), issued a warning: “We must not forget that the record on which we judge the defendants today is the record on which we will be judged tomorrow.”

As it turned out, he was wrong. The practices established at Nuremberg, and the understandings behind them, later codified in the 1950 Nuremberg Principles, have not proved to be the record by which U.S. actions in war, whether in Vietnam or in today’s never-ending war on terror, have been judged. Nonetheless, it’s worth taking a look at those ideas, because they provide an excellent basis for assessing just who are the real war criminals still walking among us.

Nuremberg established the principle that the international laws of war are real laws and that breaking them is a real crime. That’s what the International Criminal Court in The Hague, Netherlands, was created to adjudicate — even though the United States quickly removed itself from the ICC in 2002, the year it began functioning. It was then that President George W. Bush’s top officials started getting nervous about their new CIA torture program. And lest we think of that as ancient history, remember that it was John Bolton, President Trump’s current national security advisor, who delivered the newsto the United Nations that the U.S. was leaving the court.

Under the Nuremberg Principles, even heads of state or other high government officials are not immune from prosecution for war crimes or crimes against humanity, nor can anyone be exonerated for them on the sole grounds of a superior’s orders. (That defense was nevertheless used by the My Lai killers and some of those President Trump is now thinking about pardoning.)

Before the Nuremberg tribunals could begin, the organizers had to decide what the charges would be. They settled on three major kinds of offense, which still frame the way we think about war crimes today. The first (which generated the most disagreement among the four Great Powers) was “crimes against peace” — in other words, involvement in launching a war of aggression. The French and the Soviets were dubious about trying Nazi officials for a crime that wasn’t explicitly identified in international law when the war started. Ironically, in view of this country’s twenty-first-century wars, it was Robert Jackson, backed by Secretary of War Henry Stimson, who in 1945 argued that all the rest of Germany’s war crimes sprang from this initial crime of waging an unprovoked war of aggression. In short (and logically enough), no war, no war crimes.

“War crimes” — violations of the laws of war such as mistreatment, torture, or execution of prisoners, or disproportionate harm to civilians — formed the second category. The third was, like the first, a new kind of crime made necessary by the unprecedented genocide of the Holocaust, and it was called “crimes against humanity.”

As I argued in my book American Nuremberg: The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial for Post-9/11 War Crimes, there’s a sense in which most of the crimes of the U.S. war on terror — the tortures, the drone assassinations, the hundreds of thousands of pointless civilian deaths, the millions of people displaced and turned into refugees — sprang from the determination of then-Vice President Dick Cheney and his coterie of neocons to commit a crime against peace by invading Iraq. (Some of his acolytes like Elliott Abrams and John Bolton have ominously resurfaced in the Trump administration and have been doing their best lately to gin up new wars of aggression against Venezuela and Iran.)

Some (myself among them) have argued that the invasion of Afghanistan was also a crime against peace. Starting what has become the longest war in U.S. history was not the only option available to the Bush administration after the 9/11 attacks. It could have, for example, treated them as a horrendous crime, rather than an act of war, and used international channels like the International Criminal Court to prosecute those responsible. It could have continued its negotiations with the Taliban government for the extradition of Osama bin Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders. After all, the Trump administration is talking to the Taliban now. How many lives might have been saved with a little more patience in 2001?

In any case, U.S. war crimes, including torture, sprang from the desire to invade Iraq. Within a few days of the al-Qaeda attacks of 9/11, Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy Paul Wolfowitz were already pushing for a war against Iraq, according to George W. Bush’s autobiography. At a Camp David “war council” held four days later, Bush wrote, Rumsfeld told him that “dealing with Iraq would show a major commitment to antiterrorism.”

As many of its victims have reported, one of the original purposes of the CIA’s infamous torture program (and its archipelago of “black sites” around the planet) was not to prevent further attacks on the United States, but to get someone, anyone, to admit to a connection between Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda and the 9/11 attacks. (There was none, of course.)

One of those prisoners was a Libyan named Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi who was shipped to Egypt and waterboarded until he agreed to the proposition that, as President George W. Bush put it in an October 2002 speech to the nation, “Iraq has trained al-Qaeda in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases.” In the same speech, Bush even explained where he got this “information,” saying, “Evidence from intelligence sources, secret communications, and statements by people now in custody reveal that Saddam Hussein aids and protects terrorists, including members of al-Qaeda.” Secretary of State Colin Powell then repeated this claim in an infamous speech to the U.N. Security Council justifying the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Al-Libi later recanted, saying his statement implicating Iraq had been forced out of him under torture, but by then, of course, Washington’s war in Iraq was well underway.

The Other War Criminals

If the United States had been judged by the standard set at Nuremberg, people of much higher position than Eddie Gallagher would be lining up today for Trump pardons. The list would be long indeed, but would certainly include President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, CIA Director George Tenet, Attorneys General Alberto Gonzales and John Ashcroft, and Zalmay Khalilzad, who was Bush’s ambassador to both Afghanistan and Iraq and is presently serving as U.S. special representative for Afghanistan reconciliation.

Meanwhile, our current criminal president contemplates pardoning the small fry, even as he orders an investigation into the agencies that had the temerity to investigate the Russian hacking of the 2016 election. We can only hope that one day soon he also finds himself in need of a pardon — like the one President Gerald Ford gave Richard Nixon after he avoided impeachment by resigning from office.

Rebecca Gordon, a TomDispatch regular, teaches at the University of San Francisco. She is the author of American Nuremberg: The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial for Post-9/11 War Crimes. Her previous books include Mainstreaming Torture: Ethical Approaches in the Post-9/11 United States and Letters from Nicaragua.

IMAGE: Former Vice President Dick Cheney speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, D.C., Feb. 10, 2011, photo by  Gage Skidmore via Flickr. 

Judge Rules Manafort Lied On Key Matter ‘At Heart Of’ Russia Probe

Judge Rules Manafort Lied On Key Matter ‘At Heart Of’ Russia Probe

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

Judge Amy Berman Jackson ruled Wednesday that Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team has shown that Paul Manafort, who served as President Donald Trump’s campaign chair, lied to investigators after agreeing to plead guilty to charges in the Russia probe.

The ruling nullifies the agreement from Mueller to give Manafort leniency, even while Manafort’s guilty pleas remain in effect.

Judge Jackson cited Manafort’s lies about his interactions with Konstantin Kilimnik, a Russian political consultant who the FBI says has ties to Russian intelligence, as being of particular interest.

The special counsel “has established by a preponderance of the evidence that the defendant intentionally made multiple false statements to the FBI, the OSC, and the grand jury concerning matters that were material to the investigation: his interactions and communications with Kilimnik,” the ruling said.

These interactions occurred during the 2016 campaign and after. In a transcript of a hearing released last week, a Mueller prosecutor said one topic of Manafort’s Kilimnik-related lies goes to the “heart” of the Russia investigation.

Judge Jackson also found that Manafort had lied about a payment from an entity known as “Firm A” and about another DOJ investigation. Mueller’s team had argued that Manafort lied about two other subject matters — his contacts with the Trump administration and a conspiracy he had already pleaded guilty to with Kilimnik — but the judge did not find sufficient evidence to rule that these were lies.

“Effectively Amy Berman Jackson just ruled that, by a preponderance of the evidence, Paul Manafort lied about conspiring with Konstantin Kilimnik DURING the campaign and in early days of Trump Admin,” argued reporter Marcy Wheeler.

Yes, Kim Kardashian Is Trump’s Smartest Adviser

Yes, Kim Kardashian Is Trump’s Smartest Adviser

The nation’s foolish and costly “War on Drugs” has destroyed so many lives — taking fathers and mothers from their families, condemning parolees to lives on the margins and decimating entire neighborhoods, especially in poor, black areas. It was uplifting, then, to hear that 63-year-old Alice Marie Johnson, who served 21 years behind bars for her non-violent involvement in a drug-selling scheme, was released from an Alabama prison earlier this week after her sentence was commuted.
Let us now praise President Donald J. Trump, whom Johnson thanked enthusiastically — appropriately so — for the clemency. Yes, there are many things wrong with Trump’s policies toward drug offenders. His attorney general, Jeff Sessions, has reversed President Barack Obama’s efforts to end lengthy sentences for non-violent drug offenders, threatening to go back to the “Reefer Madness” era.
Then there is the president’s use of his clemency powers, which have been largely reserved for celebrities and for the enemies of his enemies. It took intervention by a mega-celebrity, Kim Kardashian West, to win Johnson’s release. West had seen a viral video of Johnson telling her story from behind bars.
That said, Trump has still done something right. Even if just one injustice is corrected, the occasion is worth celebrating.
Johnson was one of the felons featured in a 2013 American Civil Liberties Union report on the lengthy prison sentences meted out to non-violent offenders. The mother of five, her life had fallen apart after she was divorced and lost her job with FedEx. She filed for bankruptcy and lenders foreclosed on her house.

As if that weren’t enough, her youngest son was killed in a motorcycle accident.
Johnson said she became involved in the drug ring as a way to make ends meet; she claims that she never made any drug deals or sold drugs herself but merely relayed messages among others involved. But federal prosecutors gave promises of leniency to several others in the drug ring in exchange for their testimony against Johnson. And, despite a clean record prior to her arrest, she was convicted of several counts and sentenced to life without parole plus 25 years. Killers have gotten less time.
It is hard to imagine that a white mother with the same clean record and minimal involvement in a drug-trafficking scheme would have been condemned to spend the rest of her life in prison. The ACLU found “a staggering racial disparity in life-without-parole sentencing for nonviolent offenses. . . Blacks are disproportionately represented in the nationwide prison and jail population, but the disparities are even worse . . . among the nonviolent LWOP population. . . .The ACLU estimates that nationwide, 65.4 percent of prisoners serving LWOP for nonviolent offenses are Black, 17.8 percent are white, and 15.7 percent are Latino.”
The popularity of life-without-parole sentences is a fairly recent feature of a criminal justice system that has become, if anything, more weighed down with unconscious prejudices over the last several decades. Sentencing felons to life without parole became more popular after the U.S. Supreme Court briefly banned the death penalty in the 1970s; it seems rational that judges, jurors and legislators would have sought out a way to confine the most violent offenders indefinitely.
But only fear, propaganda and frank racism can explain the explosion in life-without-parole sentences for non-violent crimes. In stark contrast to the sensible public conversation around the opioid epidemic, prosecutors, state legislators, police officers and members of Congress spent the 1970s and ‘80s loudly characterizing the crack epidemic as an existential threat to cities around the country — and perhaps to the nation itself. The only response, they claimed, was to lock up any and all involved for long stretches. Is it mere coincidence that the crack epidemic mostly involved black Americans?
The only glimmer of hope for those who remain incarcerated for life as a result of those wretched policies is clemency from the president. So it seems reasonable to suggest that advocates for sentencing reform round up as many Trump-friendly celebrities like Kardashian as they can — where are you, Rosanne Barr? — and show them videos of sympathetic non-violent felons. If that’s the way to get more of them out of prison, let’s get started.