THINKING FOR OURSELVES

Crimes against Humanity

By Shea Howell

Michigan Citizen, Feb. 17-23, 2008

This week the Bush administration announced its decision to seek the death penalty for six men currently held at Guantanamo prison. All six will be charged with playing central roles in the attacks of September 11. Included in the six is Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, an alleged “mastermind” of the attacks. He is also one of the people the CIA has admitted torturing.

Every person who cares about the future of our country should object to these trials and to the invocation of the death penalty. Such actions violate international law, violate the best of our own traditions, and are an outrage on the conscience of all people concerned with justice.

At the core of these trials are two central concerns for those of us who value the sanctity of human rights and the rule of law.

First, these men are being held illegally under a category made up by the Bush Administration to allow it to operate without any constraints of human decency. Using the term “enemy combatant,” the administration has said that it need not abide by international conventions governing the rights of prisoners of war. It has felt free to engage in behaviors associated with the worst periods of human history, including the Spanish Inquisition. In modern times such treatment of people has consistently been the basis for charging government officials with war crimes.

Speaking in response to the use of waterboarding, the United Nations top human rights official, Louise Arbour, said, “I would have no problem with describing the practice as falling under international definitions of torture.” She said that violators of the UN Conventions Against Torture should be prosecuted under the principle of universal jurisdiction that allows countries to try accused war criminals from other nations. She noted, “There are several precedents worldwide of states exercising their universal jurisdiction to enforce the torture convention and we can only hope that we will see more and more of these avenues of redress.”

Second, the military tribunals are nothing more than show trials. They follow the same logic as that of the prison that holds these men. They are wholly the fabrication of the Bush administration to achieve its own twisted sense of vengeance. They operate outside any accepted legal processes or safeguards. They do not even conform to the military code of justice and have been vigorously disputed by many within the Army. In these phony courts the ordinary rules of evidence, of due process, and of the basic right to face ones accuses are all ignored.

Amnesty International says that the ill treatment of prisoners was "just one flaw of a commission system set up precisely to obtain convictions under lower standards than would apply in normal courts." Human Rights Watch, a New York-based organization, also said the system lacked credibility. They commented, "Possibly putting someone to death based on evidence obtained through water-boarding, or after prolonged periods of sleep deprivation while being forced into painful stress positions, is not the answer"

The legality of these military commissions has been questioned since they were first established in 2001. Even this conservative Supreme Court struck down the first set of rules created by the Bush Administration in 2006.

Using evidence obtained by torture to prosecute people in show trials to justify their killing is itself a crime against humanity. Those who pursue these actions are nothing more than criminals hiding behind their veil of power. If the U.S. Congress does not find this reason for impeachment, we should call upon the United Nations to prosecute those responsible for these crimes against all humanity.

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