Flouting International Laws-What is Dubyas Rationale?

There were two articles in the news today. “Charles Graner sentenced to 10 years for the abuse of the Abu Ghraib prisoners.” The second was “A Bosnian Serb, Savo Todovic, deputy commander of the Faco concentration camp in the 1990s where Bosnian Muslims were tortured and killed, gave himself up. The International justice tribunal for the former Yugoslavia for war crimes and crimes against humanity during the 1992-1995 war in Bosnia is also looking for former political and army chiefs, Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, who are wanted for the murder of 8000 Muslims at Serebrenica in 1995 by Bosnian Serbs.”

It is significant that the Tribunal is searching for those in command at the time of the Bosnian massacres, yet in the US, nine soldiers have so far been charged for the abuse of prisoners with no senior officers having had to face the music yet! Apart from Charles Graner, Lynddie England and seven others, a Navy Seal Lieutenant has been charged with assaulting Monathel al Jamali who died in custody in November, 2003.The Pentagon has admitted to five deaths due to abuse while in custody while another 23 are under scrutiny.

Alberto Gonzales, the legal counsel to the Bush administration and the new Attorney General denied that Bush had authorized the use of torture but thousands of declassified documents and testimony from military officers indicate that from 2002, the White House made decisions that unleashed interrogation methods from the CIA and US special forces denounced by the International Committee of the Red Cross and US military lawyers as violations of international laws on torture. Bush,on Gonzales’ advice ruled that prisoners in Afghanistan would be denied protection under the Geneva Conventions. Gonzales justified their action by saying, “We face an enemy that targets innocent civilians. We face an enemy that doesn’t wear uniforms, an enemy that doesn’t owe allegiance to any country. They do not cherish life.”

Bybee who provided legal counsel to Gonzales and the White House produced an extraordinary memo which stated that the statutes on torture should only include extreme acts. “Where pain is physical, it must be of an intensity akin to accompanying serious injury such as death or organ failure.” “There is a significant range of acts which might constitute cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment or punishment but fail to rise to the level of torture.” The dean of international law at Yale, Harold Koh described Bybee’s opinion as “a stain upon our law and our nation’s reputation.” “A legal opinion that would have exculpated Saddam Hussein…………..can only be described as a disaster,” he said appearing on Senate hearings. More than a hundred of America’s leading lawyers have written to the Senate judiciary committee saying it was time for a full bipartisan commission with full subpoena powers to find out if torture was given the go ahead by the White House.

Two military intelligence officers, Welshofer and Jeff Williams have been charged over the death of an Iraqi Air Force Major General despite the objections of their commanding officer who said the Maj General was “very very bad.” The General was Abed Hamed Mowhoush who dies in November 2003 two days after being taken into custody. The case may expose the chain of command but it has been closed to the public.

The US attacked Iraq citing two main reasons. One, that it had chemical weapons. That claim lies exposed for what it was. The other that they had rid the world of a monster, a man who along with his depraved son, ran the country at his whim, torturing innocent citizens and inflicting atrocities against the Kurds. How is the US exposed after it’s crimes against humanity in Abu Ghraib any different from Saddam or Uday? It recently released a man of Lebanese descent, a permanent resident of Australia after two years of unlawful detention at Abu Ghraib. But then the US has decided that these people do not fit the criteria for having international laws such as the Geneva conventions apply to them.

The US has set a dangerous precedent. That you can invade anther country, arrest their people at will, dehumanize them by stripping away all their dignity and then justify it by saying that those people did not deserve to be treated as soldiers! Pakistan during the Kargil conflict did that-denied that it had sent in it’s army regulars and alleged that the mutilation of bodies of Indian soldiers was not done by them but by foreign militants so they were not answerable for it. Even when it was exposed that Pakistani army regulars were fighting in the conflict , it denied it and refused to take back the bodies of it’s own regular soldiers. The US cannot do even that. Here, it’s clearly it’s army that is responsible for the atrocities. So they do the next best thing. Allege the superior officers knew nothing about the torture and indict the juniors and hope the issue will pass over. Will the world let it get away with it?

It almost seems like a scene from William Golding’s “Lord of the Flies” in which Golding describes how a group of children stranded on an island after a plane crash and without any adult supervision slowly degenerate into blood thirsty animals hunting down and torturing members from their group when some of the kids disagree with the others. Only here they are grown ups who have taken on the role of hunting down others and then justify it by alleging that they are threatened by them. By that account the Bosnian Serbs should be let off, they felt threatened by the Bosnian Muslims, Narendra Modi should be let off, he only sanctioned muslim massacres in Gujarat which would by Bush’s administrations’ convoluted misanthropic logic a natural result of Godhra! We are playing at a child’s level of tit for tat. You did that to me so I’ll do the same to you. Only it’s couched in more complicated language. After all the US suffered 9/11 so they have the right to arrest anyone suspicious, detain anyone they suspect may have terrorist links! The world’s most self righteous democracy looks more and more like the former cold war nations that it worked so hard and so long to topple! A case of “Identifying with the Aggressor maybe.”