U.S. accuses Russia of war crimes but undermines the international body that prosecutes war crimes

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has formally accused the Russian Federation of committing war crimes in Ukraine, saying in an official statement yesterday that Russian forces have “destroyed apartment buildings, schools, hospitals, critical infrastructure, civilian vehicles, shopping centers, and ambulances, leaving thousands of innocent civilians killed or wounded.” Blinken also stressed that the U.S. is “committed to pursuing accountability using every tool available, including criminal prosecutions.”

There is only one problem though. Since the U.S. has for the past 20 years systematically undermined, cajoled and threatened the primary international institution for prosecuting war crimes – The Hague-based International Criminal Court – its calls for accountability ring hollow and smack of hypocrisy. How does the United States now expect prosecutions for war crimes to proceed against Russia when it has dismissed the ICC’s legitimacy at every turn?

Perhaps this is why Blinken studiously avoided mentioning the ICC by name in his statement yesterday. Although the ICC is the obvious venue to pursue war crimes charges against the Russian Federation, Blinken spoke instead in rather vague terms about the need for judicial review by “a court of law with jurisdiction over the crime” and pledged that the U.S. “will share information we gather with allies, partners, and international institutions and organizations, as appropriate.”

The ICC, which was established by the Rome State in 2002 on the principle of complementarity – meaning that it only exercises its jurisdiction when national courts are unwilling or unable to prosecute criminals – opened an investigation into accusations of war crimes in Ukraine days after the Russian invasion began.

In a statement issued March 11 about the ICC’s work in Ukraine, prosecutor Karim Khan said:

My Office has responded immediately to this unprecedented collective call for action by States Parties. The investigative team that I deployed to the region last week has already commenced evidence-collection activities. I am also personally seeking to engage with all relevant stakeholders and parties to the conflict with the aim of strengthening channels for the collection of relevant information and engendering coordinated action towards our common goal of ensuring accountability for crimes falling within ICC jurisdiction.

International criminal investigations require the engagement of all those who may hold information relevant to our work. Witnesses, survivors and affected communities in particular must be empowered to actively contribute to our investigations. There can be no bystanders in our effort to establish the truth and pursue those allegedly responsible for international crimes.

Considering the fact that there is a major effort underway to collect evidence of war crimes in Ukraine by the only international institution with the mandate and jurisdiction to carry out prosecutions of this nature, it is curious that Blinken did not mention the ICC by name in his statement. This omission was surely no accident – instead it reflects the rather awkward position the U.S. finds itself in of calling for prosecutions of Russian war crimes but not recognizing the legitimacy of the international body mandated to prosecute war crimes. Along with Russia, the U.S. is one of just a dozen countries that have declined to sign up to the court’s jurisdiction.

The problem for the United States, of course, is that it is also guilty of countless war crimes and if there was a powerful international institution that could effectively prosecute these crimes, many U.S. officials could find themselves in the dock at The Hague. Recognizing this possibility, in 2002 Congress passed the American Service Members Protection Act, otherwise known as the Hague Invasion Act. This law prohibits the extradition of Americans to the ICC and authorizes the U.S. the right to extract any American held at the court in The Hague.

While some dismissed this as far-fetched at the time, the possibility became more real when, in 2007, ICC Chief Prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo said that the ICC could investigate war crimes stemming from the conduct of U.S. forces in Iraq, if Iraq agreed to ratify the Rome Statute and accede to ICC jurisdiction.

Unfortunately, Iraq never did ratify the Rome Statute, and therefore no investigations of U.S. war criminals could proceed, but the ICC did examine allegations of detainee abuse in Iraq by ICC-member United Kingdom.

In 2017, the ICC opened a preliminary investigation into alleged war crimes in Afghanistan, including crimes committed by the U.S. armed forces and the CIA. On March 5, 2020, the Appeals Chamber authorized the Prosecutor to commence an investigation, which led the U.S. to impose sanctions on senior officials of the ICC, including chief prosecutor Fatou Bensouda. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said at the time that the ICC is “a thoroughly broken and corrupted institution” and “we will not tolerate its illegitimate attempts to subject Americans to its jurisdiction.”

The United Nations was dismayed over the U.S. sanctions on the ICC, with Secretary General António Guterres expressing concern and UN Special Rapporteur Diego García-Sayán saying that these policies have “the sole aim of exerting pressure on an institution whose role is to seek justice against crimes of genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and the crime of aggression.”

Now, after two decades of exerting this pressure and threatening the ICC’s independence, the U.S. finds itself in the delicate position of highlighting Russian war crimes and urging prosecutions, but dogmatically subverting the legitimacy of the institution mandated to do so.

For more on the work of the ICC, please visit the website of the Coalition for the International Criminal Court.

Global condemnation of Russia’s war on Ukraine underscores international community’s hypocrisy

The results of a vote on a resolution concerning the Ukraine are displayed during an emergency meeting of the General Assembly at United Nations headquarters, Wednesday, March 2, 2022. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)

The international condemnation of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has been resounding, with economic sanctions, boycotts and a cacophony of strongly worded denunciations calling the attack an unprovoked and unjustified war of aggression. Following a week of condemnations pouring in from regional organizations such as the EU and OSCE, as well as national governments around the world, the near unanimity of the international sentiment was expressed most clearly in a UN General Assembly resolution adopted yesterday by a vote of 141-5, with 35 abstentions.

In the General Assembly’s resolution, adopted at an emergency session convened under the UN’s “Uniting for Peace” mechanism, the UN:

1. Reaffirms its commitment to the sovereignty, independence, unity and territorial integrity of Ukraine within its internationally recognized borders, extending to its territorial waters;

2. Deplores in the strongest terms the aggression by the Russian Federation against Ukraine in violation of Article 2 (4) of the Charter;

3. Demands that the Russian Federation immediately cease its use of force against Ukraine and to refrain from any further unlawful threat or use of force against any Member State;

While on one hand, this can be seen as a powerful statement strongly supporting a country’s sovereignty and territorial integrity while condemning acts of aggression as illegitimate, the General Assembly resolution also serves as a powerful reminder of the selectiveness of the international community’s outrage.

Anyone old enough to remember the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 – a naked act of aggression based on a much flimsier pretext than Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – should recall that the response of the international community was far more muted. There were individual governments that did oppose the invasion – most notably, Germany, France and Russia who together blocked a UN Security Council authorization for the invasion – but in general the criticisms were mild in comparison to the outcry from the international community that we are seeing today.

The relative silence 19 years ago from the planet’s ruling elite stood in marked contrast to the loud calls for peace from the planet’s people, who over the course of several months in late 2002 and early 2003 organized the largest global demonstrations ever in human history. These demonstrators, numbering in the tens of millions, were pleading with their elected governments to do whatever was in their power to stop the unprovoked US invasion of Iraq, but for the most part those pleas fell on deaf ears.

One of the main calls from protest organizers back then was for the UN to convene an emergency session of the General Assembly under Uniting for Peace. The US-based Center for Constitutional Rights even drafted a proposed “Uniting for Peace” resolution that governments could submit to the General Assembly, declaring that US military action against Iraq without a Security Council resolution was contrary to the UN Charter and international law.

But in contrast to the quick action by UN Member States this week, back then they completely ignored their responsibility to uphold international peace and the UN Charter. In fact, the Uniting for Peace mechanism is invoked so rarely, that the UN’s press release on this week’s General Assembly session noted that it has only been implemented “11 or 12 times since the adoption of General  Assembly resolution 377 (V) on 3 November 1950, depending on how one characterises the first case.” The last time it was invoked was 1997.

This hypocrisy should be kept squarely in mind when listening governments today boldly call out Russia for its act of aggression against Ukraine. Now these world leaders and diplomats are falling over each other jostling for position in front of the cameras of the global media to loudly proclaim their opposition to the invasion of Ukraine, but many of these people were curiously silent two decades ago when the US carried out an unprovoked attack on a sovereign state which led to deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis, destroyed the nation, and included countless war crimes and atrocities.

Today, these self-serving hypocrites have found their voices in calling for peace, but they only do so because it is politically safe. In denouncing Russia’s war today, they are on the side of the US empire, so there is no price to pay in denouncing military aggression. But when the US launches its next illegal war, these voices will likely fall silent once again.

‘Russiagate’ impeachment push reveals U.S. indifference to corruption and war crimes

Just a couple weeks past the symbolic 100-day marker of the Trump presidency, prominent Democrats are increasingly urging the president’s impeachment for alleged improprieties related to the so-called “Russiagate” controversy. More than two dozen Democratic members of congress — and a couple Republicans — have already alluded to the possibility of initiating impeachment proceedings, and following Donald Trump’s recent firing of FBI Director James Comey, those calls are intensifying.

Democratic Rep. Al Green of Texas last week became the first congressman to call for Trump’s impeachment from the floor of the House of Representatives.

“I rise today with a heavy heart,” Green said in a dramatic speech. “I rise today with a sense of responsibility and duty to the people who have elected me, a sense of duty to this country, a sense of duty to the Constitution of the United States of America. I rise today, Mr. Speaker, to call for the impeachment of the President of the United States of America for obstruction of justice.”

The congressman went on to describe the reasons he feels impeachment is necessary. Stating that “our democracy is at risk,” Green explained that when President Trump “fired the FBI director who was investigating the President for his connections to Russian involvement in the President’s election,” the president unlawfully obstructed justice into a federal investigation.

For the sake of the rule of law, the congressman stated that Congress must initiate impeachment proceedings to ensure the principle of no one being above the law is upheld. His calls have been echoed by senators and congressmen speaking out on television talk shows and Twitter, indicating a growing trend in Washington toward the real possibility of removing this president less than a year into his first term.

There are two things noteworthy about these developments. One is that the very basis for the impeachment calls rests on a number of assumptions that may very well lack any basis in fact. For all of the talk about Trump’s alleged “collusion” with the Russian government, what is left unsaid is that the “collusion” allegations relate to a fundamentally unproven assertion – that the Russian government actually interfered in Election 2016 as part of a plot to ensure that Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in the Nov. 8 presidential election.

This alleged “interference” amounted to a supposed clandestine plot to hack the Democratic National Committee’s emails and provide the contents to WikiLeaks in order to make Clinton look bad and expose the DNC’s unfair handicapping of the insurgent Bernie Sanders campaign during the Democratic primary elections. In other words, Russia allegedly “meddled” in the election by helping to expose how corrupt the U.S. electoral system is. (It should be noted that the veracity of the emails’ contents is not disputed.)

Although this conspiracy theory has been endlessly promoted in the U.S. media and is essentially accepted as a self-evident truth by Democratic partisans, it should not be forgotten that it lacks any proof whatsoever and that there are a number of alternative possibilities for how WikiLeaks obtained the incriminating emails from the DNC.

One such theory is that they were provided by former DNC staffer Seth Rich, who was mysteriously murdered in a so-called “botched robbery” on the streets of Washington, DC, on July 10, 2016. This is the possibility that WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange alluded to when he offered a $20,000 reward for information leading to a conviction in Rich’s killing.

Although WikiLeaks has a strict policy of not naming its sources, the reward for information about the Rich murder coupled with the fact that Assange has unequivocally stated that Russia was not the source of the leaks should raise at least a few doubts about the “official conspiracy theory,” i.e. the theory promoted by mainstream media, the U.S. intelligence community and the Democratic Party that Russia – in collusion with the Trump campaign – somehow “meddled” in the election.

(For his part, Russian President Vladimir Putin has also unequivocally denied being the source of the DNC email leaks. “Read my lips – no,” he said when asked whether Russia had interfered in the U.S. election.)

It should also be noted that the closest thing to evidence to back up this official conspiracy theory amounts to a series of unproven assertions put forward by the U.S. intelligence community, which it should be recalled, has been known to tell a lie or two on occasion. In an “analytic assessment” published Jan. 6, the Director of National Intelligence concluded that the Kremlin had hacked the DNC emails in an effort to undermine Clinton’s campaign.

The official report however offers nothing approaching hard evidence of allegation of Russian interference, which Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and others have called an “act of war.” Indeed, the report states upfront that its sources and methods for reaching its conclusions remain “highly classified,” noting that “the Intelligence Community rarely can publicly reveal the full extent of its knowledge or the precise bases for its assessments, as the release of such information would reveal sensitive sources or methods and imperil the ability to collect critical foreign intelligence in the future.”

So, instead of offering proof, the report “covers the motivation and scope of Moscow’s intentions regarding US elections and Moscow’s use of cyber tools and media campaigns to influence US public opinion.” In other words, the intelligence community is offering its guesses as to why Moscow may have been motivated to engage in an “act of war” against the U.S. government without sharing a shred of proof that it actually did.

As former CIA analyst Ray McGovern describes it in a recent article,

The oft-cited, but evidence-free, CIA/FBI/NSA report of Jan. 6 – crafted by selected senior analysts, according to then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper – is of a piece with the “high-confidence,” but fraudulent, National Intelligence Estimate 15 years ago about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Basically, it’s propaganda designed to influence the American people of a predetermined conclusion – in this case that the Russian government is acting as a hostile power to interfere in “American democracy,” not unlike how the intelligence community 15 years ago worked to convince the American people that Iraq posed a grave threat with its non-existent weapons of mass destruction program.

Besides the complete lack of evidence to back up the official conspiracy theory of Russian interference in Election 2016, another thing striking about this line of attack against Trump is the fact that it ignores any number of other possibly impeachable offenses that have been committed by Trump since the day he took office.

These include violations of the Constitution’s emoluments clause, which is intended to prevent corruption and conflict of interests by ensuring that nobody holding a position of trust with the United States government can receive payments from foreign governments, whether gifts or a salary or profits.

As Richard Painter, former ethics lawyer in the George W. Bush administration, explained before Trump even took the oath of office,

If you have somebody who’s making profits from dealing with foreign governments or companies controlled by foreign governments, that person must dispense with those profits, cannot receive that money, while holding any position of trust with the United States government. That applies to every U.S. government employee, including the president. And so, what this means is that, for Donald Trump, if he’s going to hold onto these business enterprises, which present a whole range of other conflict of interest problems, to satisfy the Constitution, at a bare minimum, what he’s going to have to do is get the foreign government money and money from foreign government-controlled corporations out of his business enterprise. And this includes foreign diplomats staying at the hotels at government expense, foreign governments having big parties in his hotels and canceling reservations at the Four Seasons, going over to the Trump Hotel, to curry favor. All of that is unconstitutional.

Interestingly, however, Democrats have apparently eschewed this line of attack in favor of the “Russiagate” narrative, effectively letting Trump off the hook for a very real constitutional issue in favor of highly dubious and unproven accusations of “collusion” with an “adversarial power” in “undermining American democracy.”

Another area of concern that Democrats appear to be turning a blind eye to is regarding the mounting evidence of war crimes committed since Trump was sworn in as president last January.

The war crimes began within days of Trump’s inauguration, with Navy SEALs conducting a raid in Yemen on January 29 raid ending up with dozens of innocents killed and the loss of a $70 million MV-22 Osprey aircraft.

As Charles Pierson describes the deadly raid at CounterPunch,

Two deaths stand out.  One was the Trump Administration’s first combat fatality: 36- year old Chief Special Warfare Operator William “Ryan” Owens.

The second was an 8-year old American citizen, Nawar Al-Awlaki.  Nawar’s father was the US-born cleric and Al-Qaeda recruiter and propagandist, Anwar Al-Awlaki.  Al-Awlaki was assassinated in a US drone strike in Yemen on September 30, 2011.  Shortly afterwards, Nawar’s 16-year old brother Abdulrahman was also killed by a US drone, probably inadvertently.

Thanks to the US, the Awlakis—father, son, and daughter—are together again.  It’s too bad the Awlakis can’t thank the Pentagon themselves.

Besides this incident, the routine use of flying robots (commonly known as “drones”) to rain death from above half-way around the world has shot up 432% under the Trump administration, continuing a trend started under the Bush-43 administration and intensified under President Obama to use unmanned aerial vehicles to indiscriminately kill terrorist suspects while also terrorizing civilian populations.

Indeed, Trump has killed enormous numbers of civilians in drone strikes, many of which have taken place far from any battlefield, in places such as Yemen, Pakistan, and Somalia. However, according to international humanitarian law, the legal use of military force are limited only to areas of “armed conflict.”

Because the United States is not involved in an armed conflict with Yemen, Pakistan, and Somalia, nor has any of these countries attacked the United States, Trump’s actions are violations of the United Nations Charter.

Other violations of the UN Charter include recent attacks on Syria, which were carried out both in violation of international law and without congressional authorization. Congressman Ted Lieu responded to news last week that the U.S. military bombed forces allied with the Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad with a tweet denouncing the attack as “frickin illegal.”

“Trump does not have Congressional authorization to attack Syria, a country that has not attacked U.S.,” Lieu pointed out.

While Lieu’s complaint was a welcome departure from the deafening silence that usually accompanies acts of U.S. military aggression, it should be kept in mind that voices such as his are the exception to the rule. And compared to the growing chorus of calls for impeachment over unfounded “Russiagate” allegations, the voices in the wilderness complaining of U.S. war crimes remain few and far between.

What this indicates is that while the U.S. ruling class – or what is commonly referred to as the “deep state” – has grown increasingly weary of Trump’s friendly moves toward Russia, what it doesn’t seem to mind is a policy of war crimes. Indeed, when Trump carries out acts of military aggression, he is generally lauded across the political spectrum for acting “presidential” and showing “leadership.”

In other words, what the deep state cannot abide is rapprochement, what it really wants is endless war.

Trump’s proposed hike in military spending likely to kick off new arms race

President Donald Trump this week proposed a $54 billion boost in U.S. military spending, representing a nearly 10 percent increase, to be funded by cuts to domestic spending and foreign aid. As the National Priorities Project points out, the proposed increase is more than the annual budgets of the Department of Homeland Security ($48 billion), Housing and Urban Development ($38 billion), Department of Energy ($30 billion), Department of Justice ($29 billion), and Department of State ($29 billion).

It is also well above the annual budgets of Environmental Protection Agency and National Science Foundation, which come in at $8 and $7 billion a piece. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, in stark contrast, only receives $485 million a year and the National Endowment for the Arts just $148 million. “Domestic and foreign aid spending already account for less than half of the federal discretionary budget,” the National Priorities Project points out, while the Pentagon accounts for “more than half of the annual discretionary budget” at more than $600 billion a year.

Yet, President Trump proudly stated last night in an address to a joint session of Congress that he is pushing for the biggest military spending hike in generations. “I am sending the Congress a budget that rebuilds the military, eliminates the Defense sequester, and calls for one of the largest increases in national defense spending in American history,” he said. Of course, he failed to mention that the U.S. already spends about as much as the next 12 countries combined.

Trump’s proposed increase in military spending is part of a broader budget plan that includes massive cuts to the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. So, basically, less Sesame Street, more war.

Besides questions of national priorities at a time when the country faces a host of problems on issues across the board – from crumbling infrastructure to the fact that more than 43 million people are living in poverty – the sharp increase in “defense” spending at a time of rising global instability and distrust likely means that other countries will feel compelled to follow suit in order to keep up.

Recalling the fact that Trump recently indicated his willingness to kick off a global arms race, actually stating in December 2016 “let it be an arms race” in response to criticisms of his flippant remarks about nuclear weapons, the military increases that he is now proposing should be understood as an opening salvo in what is sure to be a growing trend towards militarization and war.

This is a troubling development by any standard, but for a country with as long a history of aggression and atrocities as the United States, it is even more worrying.

Notably, the U.S. has just been exposed for using depleted uranium munitions during air raids in Syria, despite a vow not to use the toxic, radioactive and legally ambiguous weapons in the battlefield. Foreign Policy magazine reported two weeks ago that Air Force A-10 attack planes fired more than 5,000 rounds of 30mm depleted uranium rounds during a pair of assaults on convoys in an ISIS-controlled part of eastern Syria in November 2015 despite the fact that the weapons have been linked to cancer and birth defects.

Trump’s budget proposals also come just after the release of a major report detailing trends in global military spending and arms transfers. The report by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) found that the volume of international transfers of major weapons has grown continuously since 2004 and increased by 8.4 per cent between 2012 and 2016. Notably, SIPRI found, “transfers of major weapons in 2012-16 reached their highest volume for any five-year period since the end of the cold war.”

The five biggest exporters – the United States, Russia, China, France and Germany – together accounted for 74 percent of the total volume of arms exports, while the U.S. alone accounted for a disproportionate one-third of the total. The lion’s share of its arms transfers went to the Middle East, fueling conflicts there in Syria, Yemen and Israel-Palestine, likely contributing significantly to the refugee crisis that is now destabilizing Europe.

As SIPRI reports:

With a one-third share of global arms exports, the USA was the top arms exporter in 2012–16. Its arms exports increased by 21 per cent compared with 2007–11. Almost half of its arms exports went to the Middle East.

‘The USA supplies major arms to at least 100 countries around the world—significantly more than any other supplier state’, said Dr Aude Fleurant, Director of the SIPRI Arms and Military Expenditure Programme. ‘Both advanced strike aircraft with cruise missiles and other precision-guided munitions and the latest generation air and missile defence systems account for a significant share of US arms exports.’

Not only is the United States fueling global conflict through its conventional military spending and arms sales around the world, but it is also potentially triggering a new nuclear arms race with the possibility of ending life on earth. This is at the same time that growing global efforts are being made to ban nuclear weapons once and for all with an ultimate goal of total nuclear disarmament.

As Trump recently told Reuters, “It would be wonderful, a dream would be that no country would have nukes, but if countries are going to have nukes, we’re going to be at the top of the pack.”

Yet, as Matthew Rosza recently pointed out, writing at Salon,

This statement seems to contradict New START, a strategic arms limitation treaty that requires America and Russia to have an equal number of strategic nuclear weapons for 10 years as of February 2018. It was reported by Reuters earlier this month that Trump denounced that treaty as a bad deal during a Jan. 28 conversation with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The Ploughshares Fund, an anti-nuclear organization, noted however that “Donald Trump’s Plan to be Leader of the Nuclear Pack Is Nuts.”

“Scientists now calculate that as few as 100 nuclear weapons used in a war in South Asia would put enough smoke and particulates in the atmosphere to enshroud the Earth in a cloud for 2 to 3 years, dropping global temperatures about 2 to 3 degrees,” according to Ploughshares.

That, as it turns out, is enough to devastate most food crops in the world. The resulting famine could kill one billion people. The panic, global mass migrations, desperation and chaos would likely result in the end of nation states.

Make it a war with 200 or 300 nuclear weapons, and all that human beings have accomplished over the millennia would be wiped out. We would be well into Mad Max scenarios.

There are some 15,000 nuclear weapons in the world. The U.S. and Russia have almost 95 percent of them. That is much more than we need for any conceivable military mission. China, for example, only has about 260 weapons, yet that seems to do a pretty good job of deterring anyone from attacking them.

With these concerns in mind the United Nations is convening negotiations this month on “a legally binding instrument to prohibit nuclear weapons, leading towards their total elimination.” This new international agreement will place nuclear weapons on the same legal footing as other outlawed weapons of mass destruction, many of which the United States continues to use, manufacture and to supply to other countries, in blatant violation of international norms.

For more information on the nuclear ban negotiations, visit the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons.

Trump presidency shaping up to be a disaster for international norms

A little more than two weeks into the presidency of Donald J. Trump, it is clear that his administration is shaping up to be one of the most hostile to international norms in recent memory. While George W. Bush once dismissed a reporter’s question about whether his Iraq policies conformed with international law by joking, “International law? I better call my lawyer,” Trump’s attitude toward rule of law principles was summed up by a tweet today disparaging a “so-called judge” who put a nationwide hold on the implementation of his travel ban on nationals of seven majority-Muslim countries.

“The opinion of this so-called judge, which essentially takes law-enforcement away from our country, is ridiculous and will be overturned!” Trump tweeted.

The travel ban has sparked a national and international outcry, with demonstrations taking place at airports across the country and numerous world leaders weighing in on Trump’s controversial executive order to halt entries into the United States by citizens of Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen.

“Discrimination on nationality alone is forbidden under human rights law,” said UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Raad Al Hussein. “The U.S. ban is also mean-spirited, and wastes resources needed for proper counter-terrorism.”

German Chancellor Angela Merkel expressed regret over the U.S. government’s entry ban and explained the U.S.’s international obligations under the 1951 Refugee Convention in a phone call with Trump, Merkel’s spokesman Steffen Seibert said in a statement.

“The Refugee Convention requires the international community to take in war refugees on humanitarian grounds. All signatory states are obligated to do. The German government explained this policy in their call yesterday,” Seibert said.

The OSCE Parliamentary Assembly’s human rights and humanitarian committee chair Ignacio Sanchez Amor expressed concerns that the ban on refugees represents a major step backward in the international community’s efforts to develop a cohesive response to the refugee and migrant crisis, and noted that on humanitarian grounds the United States cannot send refugees back to countries where they face serious threats to their life or freedom.

“This is the core principle of non-refoulement that is at the heart of the 1951 Refugee Convention, and is now a widely accepted norm,” he said.

Sanchez Amor also pointed out that the travel ban is contrary to the spirit of the OSCE’s founding document, which the United States signed along with 34 other countries of North America, Europe and Eurasia in 1975.

“To the extent that this travel ban may affect those with dual nationalities or residents of OSCE countries, I note that it may contravene the 1975 Helsinki Final Act’s stipulation that signatories should ease regulations concerning movement of citizens within the OSCE area,” he said.

In this document, the United States agreed:

to facilitate wider travel by their citizens for personal or professional reasons and to this end they intend in particular:

– gradually to simplify and to administer flexibly the procedures for exit and entry;

– to ease regulations concerning movement of citizens from the other participating States in their territory, with due regard to security requirements.

In addition to whipping up a frenzy of international condemnation over the travel ban, the Trump administration is also drawing fire for his nominations to lead the nation’s intelligence services. Yet, despite serious concerns about Trump’s pick to lead the CIA, Mike Pompeo, for his pro-torture statements and lax attitude about the use of mass surveillance, the U.S. Senate confirmed him on Jan. 23 by a vote of 66-32.

“Pompeo’s responses to questions about torture and mass surveillance are dangerously ambiguous about whether he would endorse abusive practices and seek to subvert existing legal protections,” said Human Rights Watch’s Maria McFarland Sanchez-Moreno. “Pompeo’s failure to unequivocally disavow torture and mass surveillance, coupled with his record of advocacy for surveillance of Americans and past endorsement of the shuttered CIA torture program, make clear that he should not be running the CIA.”

Democratic Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden said Pompeo was the “wrong man for the job.”

“He has endorsed extreme policies that would fundamentally erode liberties and freedoms of our people without making us safer,” Wyden said. He said Pompeo’s answers to questions from some senators have been “vague” and “contradictory,” making it impossible to know what Pompeo believes.

Nevertheless, his nomination sailed through the Senate, likely paving the way for a return to torture as U.S. policy, as President Trump has promised to do on numerous occasions. The president recently even defended torture on national television, stating unequivocally that it “works.”

Shortly following Pompeo’s confirmation, his deputy director at the CIA was named as Gina Haspel, who, according to the New York Times “played a direct role in the CIA’s ‘extraordinary rendition program,’ under which captured militants were handed to foreign governments and held at secret facilities, where they were tortured by agency personnel.”

She also ran the CIA’s first black site prison in Thailand and oversaw the brutal interrogations of two detainees, Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri.

In addition, she played a vital role in the destruction of interrogation videotapes that showed the torture of detainees both at the black site she ran and other secret agency locations. As The Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald explains:

The concealment of those interrogation tapes, which violated both multiple court orders as well the demands of the 9/11 Commission and the advice of White House lawyers, was condemned as “obstruction” by Commission Chairs Lee Hamilton and Thomas Keane. A special prosecutor and Grand Jury investigated those actions but ultimately chose not to prosecute.

As if these developments were not bad enough, it also looks as if Trump is going to continue the reckless drone assassination program that was developed by his predecessor, Barack Obama. In one of his first military actions as president, Trump ordered an attack on a village in Yemen on Jan. 29 that killed as many as 23 civilians, including a newborn baby and an eight-year-old girl, Nawar al-Awlaki.

Nawar al-Awlaki, eight-year-old girl killed by U.S. drone on Jan. 29, 2017

Nawar was the daughter of the al-Qaida propagandist and American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki, who was killed in a September 2011 US drone strike in Yemen. Awlaki’s 16-year-old son Abdulrahman was killed in a second drone strike soon afterwards.

Following the tragic killing of this young girl, The Guardian pointed out that Trump has previously endorsed killing relatives of terrorist suspects, which is a war crime. “The other thing with the terrorists is you have to take out their families, when you get these terrorists, you have to take out their families,” he told Fox News in December 2015.

The human rights organization Reprieve pointed out:

Secret US strikes, in countries where the US is not at war, are widely considered to violate international law. Previous research by Reprieve has found that, in attempts to kill 41 named individuals in Yemen and Pakistan, US strikes killed some 1,147 unknown men, women and children.

It looks as though this is one policy area that we should expect some continuity between Obama and Trump. It also looks as if Trump will be moving rapidly to reinstate the torture regime that was halted by Obama in 2009. It should be noted, however, that the use of torture – although illegal – was never prosecuted by the Obama administration, and this lack of law enforcement ensured that it would remain a “policy option” for a fascist president like Donald Trump to pull off the shelf.

Obama’s dismal human rights legacy in focus as Trump takes the helm

President Barack Obama’s human rights record is under criticism once again as he prepares to step down after eight years leading the United States government. His record has been a major disappointment to many in the human rights community, who now genuinely worry how much worse U.S. policies will become under President Donald J. Trump.

As this blog has documented since 2011, the U.S. government’s human rights record has been dismal under Obama, with troubling policies including his lack of prosecutions of torturers – effectively institutionalizing a system of legal impunity for war crimes – his utter failure to follow through on closing the travesty of justice known as Guantanamo Bay, waging a “war on whistleblowers” and suppressing freedom of information, codifying illegal policies of extrajudicial assassinations, expanding mass surveillance programs in violation of individual privacy, and failing to take effective action to ensure accountability for a nationwide epidemic of police brutality.

In terms of promoting fundamental freedoms abroad, his administration has “treated human rights as a secondary interest – nice to support when the cost was not too high, but nothing like a top priority,” according to Human Rights Watch’s Kenneth Roth.

In a recent article for Foreign Policy, Roth writes:

Obama took office with great promise, announcing on his second day that he would stop CIA torture immediately and close the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, within a year. By all accounts, the torture did stop. But Obama has steadfastly refused to prosecute those responsible or even to allow the release of much more than the summary of a comprehensive Senate Intelligence Committee report that documented it. As a result, rather than reaffirming the criminality of torture, Obama leaves office sending the lingering message that, should future policymakers resort to it, prosecution is unlikely. Given Trump’s campaign rhetoric about reinstating waterboarding (“or worse”), this is hardly an academic point, even considering the opposition of his nominee for defense secretary.

With respect to surveillance, Roth notes that “Obama seems to have continued and expanded programs begun by George W. Bush that lead to massive invasions of privacy.” When whistleblower Edward Snowden alerted the public to these programs, Obama supported legislation to limit the National Security Agency’s ability to collect phone records in bulk under one program, but “most of the mass privacy violations that Snowden disclosed remain unaddressed,” Roth notes.

When it comes to closing Guantanamo, Roth says the president’s efforts have been halfhearted:

Early in his tenure, he moved slowly, enabling Congress to adopt legislation — which he refused to veto — imposing various obstacles to transferring detainees overseas and barring their transfer to the United States even for trial. Facing political resistance, he reversed early plans to try the accused 9/11 plotters in a federal district court in New York, where their trials would long ago have been completed. Instead, the suspects were placed before Guantánamo’s military commissions — made-from-scratch tribunals replete with procedural problems. Seemingly designed to avoid public revelation of the details of the suspects’ torture, the commissions have made virtually no progress toward actual trials, which will not begin until long after Obama leaves office, if ever.

Roth notes that Obama has slowly reduced the number of prisoners held at Guantanamo by transferring many abroad, but “his insistence on holding some two dozen detainees indefinitely without charge makes it easier for Trump to repopulate Guantánamo, as he has threatened.”

When it comes to Guantanamo, Amnesty International is imploring Obama to do whatever he can in his last days in office to close the legal abomination before Trump – who has threatened to repopulate the prison and reinstate a torture regime – takes over as president on January 20. In an open letter to Obama, Amnesty International USA Executive Director Margaret Huang begs the president, “Don’t Leave Guantánamo to Trump.”

“Dear President Obama,” she writes:

On behalf of Amnesty International’s 1.2 million supporters in the United States, I write to make a final plea that you use all the powers of your office to close the detention camp at Guantánamo Bay. We are gravely concerned that if you fail to do so, President-elect Trump may attempt to bring dozens or even hundreds of people there, to be held in unlawful detention for decades and possibly subjected to torture and other forms of cruel treatment.

Despite your positive actions to date, your legacy will include failing to cure this corruption of our country’s ideals of justice and fairness. You will leave behind Guantánamo as a system of injustice that—having survived for 15 years, two political parties and four presidential terms of office—may remain open for the foreseeable future.

Our concern is heightened by the sharp rise in anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant rhetoric during the election. Proposals for large-scale detention without charge, which once seemed inconceivable, are now on the table as options your successor may pursue. Guantánamo, with its shameful tradition of secrecy and insularity from legal process, would be all too convenient a location for mass imprisonment without charge, returning the United States to one of its grimmest chapters.

“It is past time to shut down the detention facility at Guantánamo,” you said recently at MacDill Air Base, and not for the first time. You emphasized that Congress would be “judged harshly by history” due to restrictions it placed on your ability to transfer detainees. However, despite your concerted efforts, it is your presidency that will be judged harshly — by history, the international community and human rights supporters across the United States and the rest of the world — if you fail to take all possible measures to transfer those remaining out of Guantánamo.

Your actions now will impact this country’s decisions on detention without charge, torture and human rights for decades to come by informing the way young people understand the injustice of Guantánamo. People under the age of 25 have spent all or much of their lives with Guantánamo open. Most are too young to remember the photos of torture at Abu Ghraib, or of men at Camp X-Ray kneeling next to their cages. They do not know the collective shock and moral outrage that millions of Americans felt then, which led political figures from Colin Powell to John McCain to call for the closure of Guantánamo. Through your actions now, you can ensure new generations learn this history—and do not repeat it.

We also urge your administration, in closing Guantánamo, to abandon the military commissions. These ill-conceived tribunals simultaneously fail to respect human rights principles or achieve justice. To be sure, anyone responsible for the crimes against humanity committed on September 11, 2001 should be brought to justice in fair trials. Guantánamo and the military commissions have not—and cannot—provide that justice. The 15th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks recently passed, and those who lost loved ones in the attacks have a right to see justice in their lifetime. However, not only do the military commission trials seem unlikely to begin—much less conclude—for years to come, when they do take place they will fail to meet international fair trial standards.

You began your presidency with an executive order to end the Guantánamo detentions and to close the detention camp there. We urge you to end it with bold action to realize your promise.

The human rights group urges supporters to send messages to Obama urging him to close this travesty of justice once and for all, and to prioritize other human rights matters in the waning days of his presidency.

It is not clear, however, how much stock Obama places in the concerns of the human rights community. He spoke rather dismissively of “activist organizations” in a recent interview with The Atlantic, in which he defended his drone assassination program, which has killed hundreds of innocent people including U.S. citizens.

“I think right now we probably have the balance about right,” he told The Atlantic, referring to the ratio of killed terrorists and innocent civilians. “Now, you wouldn’t know that if you talked to Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International or some of the international activist organizations.”

He further asserted that “the internal reforms we put in place had less to do with what the left or Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International or other organizations were saying and had more to do with me looking at sort of the way in which the number of drone strikes was going up and the routineness with which, early in my presidency, you were seeing both DOD and CIA and our intelligence teams think about this.”

It troubled him, he said, because the drone strikes could enable “a president who can carry on perpetual wars all over the world, and a lot of them covert, without any accountability or democratic debate.” Of course, this is exactly what Obama has done, as has been repeatedly pointed out.

As Naureen Shah of Amnesty International told The Intercept last year, “What’s so interesting is that President Obama acknowledges this problem – that future presidents will be empowered to kill globally, and in secret. What he doesn’t acknowledge is how much of a role his administration had in making that a bizarre normal.”

Another legacy that Obama is leaving behind is torture impunity, which he has instituted by failing to launch prosecutions of gross human rights violations during the Bush administration. By shielding torturers from criminal justice, Obama has done more than any other president in history in establishing torture as little more than a “policy option” for presidents to utilize or not depending on the political whims of the day.

To prevent torture from being reinstituted by the incoming Trump administration, the National Religious Campaign Against Torture is calling on Obama to release in full the Senate’s torture report and force “appropriate officials” to read it in order to ensure that they “learn from the past.” Although White House Counsel Neil Eggleston recently announced that Obama will archive one copy of the torture report, it will remain classified for at least 12 years. “At this time, we are not pursuing declassification of the full Study,” he wrote recently in a letter to Sen. Feinstein.

In an action alert, the online advocacy group Roots Action is urging supporters to sign a petition to President Obama urging him to release the full report.

Obama is also being urged by a range of organizations to free the U.S. government’s political prisoners, including Chelsea Manning, Jeffrey Sterling and Leonard Peltier. For more on those cases, click here.

‘Rogue country’: International community reacts to U.S. election, frets over Trump presidency

The international community was prepared to criticize the United States last week – regardless of who prevailed in the election – for its arcane, highly decentralized and deeply flawed electoral system. Now, with Donald J. Trump poised to become the 45^th president, there are myriad other reasons to criticize the U.S. as well.

Two international organizations deployed election observation missions to the United States to monitor the vote, and while their final reports varied considerably, both the Organization of American States and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe highlighted numerous deficiencies in the way the United States chooses its leaders.

Although generally positive in its tone, the OAS final report identified the following issues as representing key areas for improvement in the U.S. electoral system:

• Taking measures to avoid the excessive concentration of voters and long lines in the voting centers.
• Broaden the cooperation between states to compare information and avoid possible duplications in voter registries.
• Expand the practice of designing electoral districts through independent, non-partisan commissions.
• Analyze the impact of the decision of the Supreme Court to eliminate parts of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
• Establish better and stricter rules to govern PACs and super PACs.
• Leave behind the polarizing and divisive campaign rhetoric and promote a civil dialogue between opposing visions.

The OAS also noted the unusual practice in the United States of simultaneously requiring voter identification while not providing this required identification.

“Practically all countries in the region provide at least one free form of national identification to their citizens, which is used for electoral purposes,” said the OAS, which represents 35 independent countries of the Western hemisphere. “In the U.S., 32 states currently have laws in force that require voters to show some form of prescribed identification to verify their identity before casting a vote.”

However, these states do not make this identification readily available to citizens, contrary to good practice.

This is also a weakness that the OSCE pointed out in its report, noting:

Voter identification rules are politically divisive and vary across the states, with 32 states requiring photo identification. A high volume of litigation regarding voter identification continued up to election day, generating confusion among voters and election officials regarding the application of rules. Efforts to ensure the integrity of the vote are important, but should not lead to the disenfranchisement of eligible voters.

As the OSCE also pointed out: “Recent legal changes and decisions on technical aspects of the electoral process were often motivated by partisan interests, adding undue obstacles for voters. Suffrage rights are not guaranteed for all citizens, leaving sections of the population without the right to vote.”

The 57-member state organization also noted the undue obstacles faced by minor parties and independents trying to compete in U.S. elections.

“The number of signatures required and the signature submission deadlines vary from state to state, which made it cumbersome for third party or independent candidates to register across all states for presidential elections,” the OSCE pointed out. “Both the Green Party and Libertarian Party challenged ballot access requirements in several states, with success in a few instances.”

Campaign financing’s lack of transparency and ineffective enforcement of campaign finance laws was also noted:

The Federal Election Commission (FEC) oversees a campaign finance regime that imposes few actual limits on donations and does not limit expenditure. All financial reports are published expeditiously, but transparency is diminished by the absence of disclosure for some types of non-profit organizations that play an important role in the campaign. Partisan decision making has limited the FEC’s ability to reach decisions on key campaign finance issues.

The election-rigging process known as gerrymandering was also highlighted as a problem, with the OSCE pointing to “longstanding concerns that redistricting is a largely partisan process, which has led to a number of uncompetitive contests.” The election watchdog noted that 28 candidates for the House ran unopposed in these elections.

The undemocratic nature of the U.S.’s indirect elections – enabled by the controversial Electoral College system – was also alluded to, with the OSCE noting that “the system allows for a candidate to win the popular vote nationwide while falling short of the majority of Electoral College votes.”

This is precisely what appears to have taken place in Election 2016, with Donald Trump assuming the presidency despite his opponent Hillary Clinton receiving some 800,000 more votes nationwide than Trump. It is the second time this century that the popular vote loser has prevailed in the Electoral College and will move into the White House despite a plurality of voters preferring someone else.

Beyond the electoral system itself, international leaders are now raising concerns about the specter of a Trump presidency and what it will mean for the global system of alliances, international agreements, trade regimes, and international law. In particular, with Trump having repeatedly threatened to pull the U.S. out of the landmark Paris Agreement on climate change, global figures such as UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon stressed the importance of continued U.S. engagement in multilateral diplomacy.

The day after the election, the UN chief noted that today’s global challenges demand concerted global action and joint solutions.

“As a founding member of the United Nations and permanent member of the Security Council, the United States is an essential actor across the international agenda,” Ban said. “The United Nations will count on the new Administration to strengthen the bonds of international cooperation as we strive together to uphold shared ideals, combat climate change, advance human rights, promote mutual understanding and implement the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to achieve lives of peace, prosperity and dignity for all.”

Mary Robinson, a former Irish president and UN human rights chief, warned that the United States would become “a kind of rogue country” if it pulls out of the Paris Agreement, leaving the world more vulnerable to droughts, hurricanes, rising sea levels, high temperatures and other climate extremes.

“It would be a tragedy for the United States and the people of the United States if the U.S. becomes a kind of rogue country, the only country in the world that is somehow not going to go ahead with the Paris Agreement,” Robinson said.

Trump has promised to pull the United States out of that global climate accord, which was agreed last year by 193 countries and which went into effect earlier this month. If he follows through on this campaign pledge, European leaders may  call for a carbon tax on American imports.

“Donald Trump has said – we’ll see if he keeps this promise – that he won’t respect the conclusions of the Paris climate agreement,” said French presidential candidate Nicolas Sarkozy on November 13.

“Well, I will demand that Europe put in place a carbon tax at its border, a tax of 1-3%, for all products coming from the United States, if the United States doesn’t apply environmental rules that we are imposing on our companies,” he added.

Another area of concern to U.S. allies is what Trump’s victory means for the NATO military alliance. In an interview with the New York Times last July, Trump indicated that he would make U.S. military commitments to the NATO alliance – predicated on principles of collective defense – conditional upon other countries’ financial contributions to the alliance.

European Union leaders held an emergency meeting in Brussels Sunday night, dealing in part with this question and also exploring issues such as possible U.S. policy changes towards Russia and Iran.

EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini said after Sunday’s dinner that “values, principles, interests” will continue to form the basis of the alliance with the United States, and said that Europe is “looking forward to a very strong partnership with the next administration.”

“We would like to know what intentions he has regarding the [NATO] alliance. We must know what climate policies he intends to pursue. This must be cleared up in the next few months,” said European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker.

Others are raising concerns that Trump will follow through on campaign promises to reinstate the Bush administration’s torture regime, an illegal policy that was halted – but not punished – by the Obama administration.

Despite Obama’s touted “reaffirmation” of the ban on torture, “Trump easily could rescind Obama’s orders and direct the CIA to capture and humanely interrogate terror suspects in secret overseas, something many Republicans have urged,” noted Ken Dilanian at NBC News. “Trump also has some wiggle room via executive order on what constitutes torture, despite the change in the law.”

As Margaret Huang, executive director of Amnesty International USA, pointed out in a blog post on Monday,

Trump has said that not only does he “like” waterboarding, he doesn’t think it goes far enough.

Apparently, it bears repeating: Waterboarding is torture. And it is therefore a gross violation of human rights law. Waterboarding was banned by the military in the 2006 Army Field Manual. President Obama extended the ban to the CIA with an executive order in 2009.

Torture of any kind does not make anyone safer as information gathered under such circumstances is highly suspect. It undermines the standing of any country that seeks to influence others when it comes to human rights.

The United States’ history of using torture against prisoners is deeply shameful. It must remain in the past.

Other possible Trump policies that she highlighted as problematic from a human rights perspective include: closing the door on refugees, banning Muslims from entering the US, building a wall between the United States and Mexico, restrictions on reproductive freedom, and allowing more guns on U.S. streets.

Others have raised concerns that the permissive body of “secret law” that has purportedly guided the U.S. drone assassination policy under President Obama will be carried over into the Trump administration. This is especially worrisome because Trump has already made clear his intentions to target not just suspected terrorists but also their families in what would be a clear-cut war crime against non-combatants.

As Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director at the American Civil Liberties Union, writes today in the Guardian:

Now the lethal bureaucracy whose growth Obama personally oversaw will be turned over to a new administration. The powers Obama claimed will be wielded by another president. Perhaps as significant is the jarring fact that the practice of targeted killing – assassination, as it would once have been called, without a second thought – no longer seems remarkable, and the fact that the United States now boasts a legal and bureaucratic infrastructure to sustain this practice. Eight years ago the targeted-killing campaign required a legal and bureaucratic infrastructure, but now that infrastructure will demand a targeted-killing campaign. The question the next president will ask is not whether the powers Obama claimed should be exploited, but where, and against whom.

Those who oppose these policies – whether on the grassroots level, within the U.S. government, or in the international community – should act now to ensure that Trump feels the pressure from day one before he launches an international crisis with brash and ill-conceived initiatives such as pulling the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement, reinstating torture or expanding Obama’s illegal assassination program.

A good place to start would be protesting the planned inauguration ceremonies on January 20, 2017. A number of groups are already organizing to do just that. See these websites for more information:

• Occupy the Inauguration
• #DisruptJ20

Iraq war aggressors escape prosecution for 13th consecutive year

Can we hope to see this cover of TIME magazine some day?

Although the past year brought a glimmer of hope that there might be some accounting for the eight years of lawlessness and criminality that reigned while George W. Bush was in the White House, with the former president reportedly canceling a planned trip to speak at the Switzerland-based United Israel Appeal last December amid calls by several human rights groups for Swiss authorities to arrest him for authorizing torture, one of the greatest crimes of the 21st century remained unpunished, with not a single prosecution of the architects of the Iraq war, which was launched March 19-20, 2003.

For 13 years, the Iraq war aggressors have walked free despite being responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocents, the absolute destruction of a nation, and facilitating the rise of ISIS, the most brutal terrorist group on the planet. The lack of prosecutions continues to confirm that the concept of “international justice” remains an illusion, to paraphrase Bob Marley, to be pursued but never attained. The lack of prosecutions is especially glaring considering the fact that Chelsea Manning is serving a grossly disproportionate 35-year prison sentence for revealing evidence of U.S. war crimes in Iraq and other state secrets.

It is not Chelsea Manning who should be in prison, but the Iraq war’s chief architects, including Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, and the chief war criminal George W. Bush. They are the ones who launched an aggressive war, what Nuremberg prosecutor Robert Jackson once denounced as “the greatest menace of our time.”

Jackson noted in 1945 that “to start an aggressive war has the moral qualities of the worst of crimes.” The Nuremberg tribunal, he said, had decided that “to initiate a war of aggression … is not only an international crime: it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of whole.”

When it comes to Iraq, the accumulated evil of the whole is difficult to fully comprehend. In 2003, Iraq was a country that had already been devastated by a U.S.-led war a decade earlier and crippling economic sanctions that caused the deaths of 1.5 million Iraqis (leading to the resignation of two UN humanitarian coordinators who called the sanctions genocidal). Following the U.S. invasion and occupation, another million or so were killed, and by 2014, a former CIA director conceded that Iraq no longer existed.

“I think Iraq has pretty much ceased to exist,” said Michael Hayden. “It’s divided into three parts. … I don’t see them getting back together and we need to deal with that reality.”

In other words, the United States completely destroyed a sovereign nation. It is therefore no exaggeration to call the 2003 invasion of Iraq one of the great crimes of history, and it does not reflect well on the international community that it has allowed the architects to escape any meaningful punishment for 13 years.

What follows is a partial accounting of some of the more brazen violations of international law related to the U.S. war on Iraq, which prosecutors may feel free to use as the basis for a criminal probe.

Although the invasion didn’t officially begin until March 20, 2003 (still the 19th in Washington), the United States had been threatening to attack the country as early as January 2003, with the Pentagon publicizing plans for a so-called “shock and awe” bombing campaign in what appeared to be a form of psychological warfare against Iraq in violation of the UN Charter.

“If the Pentagon sticks to its current war plan,” CBS News reported on January 24, “one day in March the Air Force and Navy will launch between 300 and 400 cruise missiles at targets in Iraq. … [T]his is more than number that were launched during the entire 40 days of the first Gulf War. On the second day, the plan calls for launching another 300 to 400 cruise missiles.”

A Pentagon official warned: “There will not be a safe place in Baghdad.”

The effect of these threats particularly on Iraqi youth was profound. A group of psychologists published a report in January 2003 describing the looming war’s effect on children’s mental health.

“With war looming, Iraqi children are fearful, anxious and depressed,” they found. ”Many have nightmares. And 40 percent do not think that life is worth living.”

The Pentagon’s vaunted “shock and awe” attack began with limited bombing on March 19-20, as U.S. forces unsuccessfully attempted to kill Saddam Hussein. Attacks continued against a small number of targets until March 21, 2003, when the main bombing campaign began. U.S.-led forces launched approximately 1,700 air sorties, with 504 using cruise missiles.

The attack was a clear violation of the UN Charter, which stipulates that “Members shall settle their international disputes by peaceful means in such a manner that international peace and security, and justice, are not endangered.” The only exception to this is in the case of Security Council authorization, which the U.S. did not have.

Desperate to kill Hussein, Bush ordered the bombing of an Iraqi residential restaurant on April 7.  A single B-1B bomber dropped four precision-guided 2,000-pound bombs. The four bunker-penetrating bombs destroyed the target building, the al Saa restaurant block and several surrounding structures, leaving a 60-foot crater and unknown casualties.

Diners, including children, were ripped apart by the bombs. One mother found her daughter’s torso and then her severed head. U.S. intelligence later confirmed that Hussein wasn’t there.

After the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime on April 9, the U.S. action in Iraq took on the character of an occupation, and as the occupying power, the U.S. was bound by international law to provide security. But in the post-war chaos, in which looting of Iraq’s national antiquities was rampant, U.S. forces stood by as Iraq’s national museum was looted and countless historical treasures were lost.

Despite the fact that U.S. officials were warned even before the invasion that Iraq’s national museum would be a “prime target for looters” by the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, set up to supervise the reconstruction of postwar Iraq, U.S. forces took no action to secure the building. In protest of the U.S. failure to prevent the resulting looting of historical artefacts dating back 10,000 years, three White House cultural advisers resigned.

“It didn’t have to happen”, Martin Sullivan – who chaired the President’s Advisory Committee on Cultural Property for eight years – told Reuters news agency. The UN’s cultural agency UNESCO called the loss and destruction “a disaster.”

During the course of the war, according to a four-month investigation by USA Today, the U.S. dropped 10,800 cluster bombs on Iraq. “The bomblets packed inside these weapons wiped out Iraqi troop formations and silenced Iraqi artillery,” reported USA Today. “They also killed civilians. These unintentional deaths added to the hostility that has complicated the U.S. occupation.”

U.S. forces fired hundreds of cluster munitions into urban areas from late March to early April, killing dozens and possibly hundreds of Iraqi civilians. The attacks left behind thousands of unexploded bomblets that continued to kill and injure civilians weeks after the fighting stopped.

(Because of the indiscriminate effect of these duds that keep killing long after the cessation of hostilities, the use of cluster munitions is banned by the international Convention on Cluster Munitions, which the United States has refused to sign.)

Possibly anticipating a long, drawn-out occupation and counter-insurgency campaign in Iraq, in a March 2003 memorandum Bush administration lawyers devised legal doctrines justifying certain torture techniques, offering legal rationales “that could render specific conduct, otherwise criminal, not unlawful.”

They argued that the president or anyone acting on the president’s orders are not bound by U.S. laws or international treaties prohibiting torture, asserting that the need for “obtaining intelligence vital to the protection of untold thousands of American citizens” supersedes any obligations the administration has under domestic or international law.

“In order to respect the President’s inherent constitutional authority to manage a military campaign,” the memo stated, U.S. prohibitions against torture “must be construed as inapplicable to interrogations undertaken pursuant to his Commander-in-Chief authority.”

Over the course of the next year, disclosures emerged that torture had been used extensively in Iraq for “intelligence gathering.” Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh disclosed in The New Yorker in May 2004 that a 53-page classified Army report written by Gen. Antonio Taguba concluded that Abu Ghraib prison’s military police were urged on by intelligence officers seeking to break down the Iraqis before interrogation.

“Numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant and wanton criminal abuses were inflicted on several detainees,” wrote Taguba.

These actions, authorized at the highest levels, constituted serious breaches of international and domestic law, including the Convention Against Torture, the Geneva Convention relative to the treatment of Prisoners of War, as well as the U.S. War Crimes Act and the Torture Statute.

While these are some of the more obvious examples U.S. violations of international law from the earliest days of the invasion of Iraq, for which no one has been held to account, the crimes against the Iraqi people only continued and intensified over the years.

There was the 2004 assault on Fallujah in which white phosphorus – banned under international law – was used against civilians. There was the 2005 Haditha massacre, in which 24 unarmed civilians were systematically murdered by U.S. marines. There was the 2007 “Collateral Murder” massacre revealed by WikiLeaks in 2010.

All of these crimes are calling out for punishment and the passage of time does not diminish their severity in any way, shape or form. Indeed, with Iraq still reeling from an ongoing civil war and with President Obama joining his predecessors as the fourth consecutive American president to bomb that poor country, it is clear that accountability is still needed for these disastrous policies and war crimes.

A good place to start would be arresting George W. Bush and putting him on trial in The Hague.

U.S.-supplied cluster bombs terrorizing civilians in Yemen

Human Rights Watch issued a damning report yesterday offering new evidence that Saudi Arabia has been using U.S.-made and -supplied cluster munitions on civilians in war-torn Yemen, despite a nearly universal global ban on the weapons. Their use may violate both international and United States law, HRW pointed out.

The report, which includes photographs showing unexploded U.S. cluster bombs in Yemen, is putting new pressure on the United States over support for its close ally Saudi Arabia, at a time when an international campaign is growing for a moratorium on arms transfers to the human rights-abusing dictatorship.

“The Americans have sold arms and furnished training and expertise to a Saudi-led coalition that has faced widespread criticism for what rights groups call an indiscriminate bombing campaign against Yemen’s Houthi rebels in nearly a year of fighting,” the New York Times reported.

As Human Rights Watch documented:

Recently transferred US-manufactured cluster munitions are being used in civilian areas contrary to US export requirements and also appear to be failing to meet the reliability standard required for US export of the weapons. …

Human Rights Watch believes the Saudi Arabia-led coalition of states operating in Yemen is responsible for all or nearly all of these cluster munition attacks because it is the only entity operating aircraft or multibarrel rocket launchers capable of delivering five of the six types of cluster munitions that have been used in the conflict.

Cluster bombs contain submunitions, or bomblets, that disperse widely and kill indiscriminately, especially when used in civilian areas. Many bomblets can fail to explode, effectively becoming landmines that continue to pose a threat to civilians for years to come.

Steve Goose, arms director at Human Rights Watch and chair of the international Cluster Munition Coalition, noted that the use of these weapons violates international norms. “Saudi Arabia and its coalition partners, as well as their US supplier, are blatantly disregarding the global standard that says cluster munitions should never be used under any circumstances,” he said. “The Saudi-led coalition should investigate evidence that civilians are being harmed in these attacks and immediately stop using them.”

John Kirby, the State Department spokesman, said in a statement Sunday night: “We have seen the Human Rights Watch report, and are reviewing it. Obviously we remain deeply concerned by reports of harm to civilians and have encouraged the Saudi-led coalition to investigate reports of civilian harm.”

Two BLU-108 canisters, from a CBU-105 Sensor Fuzed Weapon, found in the al-Amar area in northern Yemen. — HRW

While HRW points out that any use of any type of cluster munition should be condemned, there are two additional disturbing aspects to the use of the particular model being used in Yemen – CBU-105 Sensor Fuzed Weapons – which are notoriously unreliable, leaving unacceptable amounts of unexploded ordinance on the ground to terrorize civilians for years to come.

“First, U.S. export law prohibits recipients of cluster munitions from using them in populated areas, as the Saudi coalition has clearly been doing,” HRW said. “Second, U.S. export law only allows the transfer of cluster munitions with a failure rate of less than 1 percent. But it appears that Sensor Fuzed Weapons used in Yemen are not functioning in ways that meet that reliability standard.”

The Convention on Cluster Munitions was adopted in Dublin on May 30, 2008 by 107 states and signed in Oslo on Dec. 3, 2008. It became binding international law when it entered into force on Aug. 1, 2010. A total of 118 states have joined the Convention, as 98 States parties and 20 Signatories.

In the treaty, states parties have agreed to never use cluster munitions, nor “develop, produce, otherwise acquire, stockpile, retain or transfer to anyone, directly or indirectly, cluster munitions,” nor “assist, encourage or induce anyone to engage in any activity prohibited to a State Party under this Convention.”

The U.S. is one of the few remaining holdouts, one of what the international community calls the “dirty dozen of cluster munitions.”

In a Jan. 12 letter to President Obama, Megan Burke, the director of the Cluster Munition Coalition urged him to “demand that Saudi-led coalition members stop using cluster munitions,” and said the United States “should investigate its own role in the recent strikes.”

To add your name to an Avaaz petition calling on world leaders “to stand up and say ‘NO’ to Saudi Arabia and their atrocities,” click here.

Another U.S.-based petition, calling on Washington to “Stop Supporting – and Start Punishing – Saudi Arabia” is available here.

Would any of the U.S. presidential candidates not commit war crimes?

If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged. – Noam Chomsky, 1990

In recent days, numerous commentators have criticized irresponsible discourse within the GOP presidential field over whether to reinstate torture and implement other war crimes – such as carpet bombing – as official U.S. policy. The 2008 Republican presidential nominee, Arizona Senator John McCain, even felt compelled to weigh in this week by calling out the “loose talk” in the Republican race.

McCain took the Senate floor Tuesday to condemn remarks by his Republican colleagues regarding the use of torture, stating that “these statements must not go unanswered because they mislead the American people about the realities of interrogation, how to gather intelligence, what it takes to defend our security and at the most fundamental level, what we are fighting for as a nation and what kind of nation we are.”

Indeed, with presidential frontrunner Donald Trump calling his chief rival Ted Cruz a “pussy” for hinting that he might show some degree of restraint in the use of torture, it’s clear that on the Republican side, the discussion has gone off the rails. This has led respected human rights groups to remind the U.S. of its moral and legal obligations not to engage in sadistic and cruel practices such as waterboarding.

“Waterboarding meets the legal definition of torture, and is therefore illegal,” recalled Human Rights First’s Raha Walla. “Torture under U.S. and international law means acts that cause severe mental or physical pain or suffering. There’s no question that waterboarding meets that definition.”

Amnesty International’s Naureen Shah also issued a rebuttal to the debate over waterboarding, which she described as “slow-motion suffocation.” She pointed out the obvious that “the atrocities of the armed group calling itself Islamic State and other armed groups don’t make waterboarding okay.” This was in response to statements by Trump and others that since Islamic State terrorists chop off people’s heads, the U.S. is right to respond with its own forms of brutality.

(“Do we win by being more like [the Islamic State]?” George Stephanopoulos asked Trump last Sunday. “Yes,” Trump responded. “I’m sorry. You have to do it that way.”)

Writing in The Guardian Wednesday, human rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith observed:

There was once a consensus that torture was immoral; even today, any sensible person knows torture is of little use if you want accurate information. Yet the current crop of Republican presidential candidates have been trying to outbid one another with promises of barbarism: Senator Ted Cruz confirmed that he favours simulated drowning, which he classifies as an “enhanced interrogation technique” (EIT) that falls short of torture. (The Spanish Inquisition was rather more honest, and called it tortura del agua.) “The Donald” immediately trumped his rival: he would “bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding”.

In a similar vein, The Intercept’s Murtaza Hussain and Dan Froomkin noted on Tuesday that the GOP is apparently competing over which candidate would commit the worst war crimes, including but not limited to torture and encompassing other atrocities such as carpet bombing. As the journalists pointed out:

In recent months, one candidate or another has promised to waterboard, do a “helluva lot worse than waterboarding,” repopulate Guantánamo, engage in wars of aggression, kill families of suspected terrorists, and “carpet bomb” Middle Eastern countries until we find out if “sand can glow in the dark.”

The over-the-top bombast plays well in front of self-selected Republican audiences — the crowd responded to the description of Cruz Monday night with full-throated chants of “Trump! Trump! Trump!” But such promises of future criminality from potential presidential nominees have outraged many legal experts.

While it is clearly troubling that the leading contenders for the Republican nomination are so eagerly trying to outdo each other on who would be the worst war criminal, what is perhaps equally troubling is that candidates on the Democratic side also seem committed to policies that could in fact qualify as war crimes.

It should be recalled that while the Republicans are speaking about hypothetical war crimes that they would like to commit if elected, there is a leading Democratic candidate who is already guilty of war crimes committed under her watch.

As Secretary of State from 2009 to 2013, Hillary Rodham Clinton was a major proponent of armed intervention and regime change in Libya, which – despite occasional claims to the contrary – was in no way authorized by the UN Security Council, making it a breach of the UN Charter.

When the Libyan civil war began in mid-February 2011, Clinton stated unequivocally that Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi “must go now, without further violence or delay.”

Despite Arab countries’ reservations about regime change, Clinton helped convince Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Jordan that a simple no-fly zone would be insufficient and argued that aerial bombing would also be necessary. Clinton then persuaded Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov that his country should abstain on the UN resolution authorizing force against Gaddafi, and she was instrumental in getting the rest of the Security Council members to approve Resolution 1973, which established a “no-fly zone.”

With this resolution secured, the U.S. promptly decided to overstep its authority, “interpreting” the authorization as carte blanche to implement a policy of regime change.

The Arab League, which had tentatively lent support to Resolution 1973, promptly objected to the bombing campaign. “What is happening in Libya differs from the aim of imposing a no-fly zone, and what we want is the protection of civilians and not the bombardment of more civilians,” said Arab League Secretary General Amr Moussa on March 20, 2011.

Despite the narrow limitations placed on the U.S. and NATO forces by the Security Council to enforce a no-fly zone in order to protect civilians, the Western powers soon made it clear that their objective was not simply to protect civilians, but to aid the rebels in the their efforts to overthrow Muammar Gaddafi.

This initial breach of international law was then compounded by subsequent war crimes, as documented by Amnesty International in the war’s aftermath.

“Scores of Libyan civilians who were not involved in the fighting were killed and many more injured, most in their homes, as a result of NATO airstrikes” in the bombing campaign to depose Gaddafi, Amnesty noted. “Regrettably,” continued Amnesty, “NATO has yet to address these incidents appropriately, including by establishing contact and providing information to the victims and their relatives about any investigation which might have been initiated.”

The war also led to an exacerbation of the security crisis in the Middle East and North Africa, fueling the civil war in nearby Syria and facilitating the rise of the Islamic State, as well as directly contributing to the refugee and migrant crisis that began to destabilize Europe.

Besides that disastrous foreign policy blunder, Clinton was also a primary supporter of the 21^st century’s first major war of aggression, the 2003 unprovoked U.S. invasion of Iraq.

For years, Clinton was a vocal supporter of this war despite its numerous documented atrocities, defending her 2002 vote as senator to authorize the invasion as necessary to counter Saddam Hussein’s alleged (but ultimately nonexistent) weapons of mass destruction program. It wasn’t until last year – 13 years after the U.S. invasion – that she finally acknowledged that her support for that war had been a “mistake.”

The other Democratic presidential contender, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, has been much more consistent in his opposition to both the Iraq war and the Libya intervention, but unfortunately has embraced other policies with questionable status under international law. He has said, for example, that as president, he would be willing to use drone strikes as liberally as President Obama has, despite serious questions about this policy’s legality.

In an interview with NBC’s Meet the Press last October, host Chuck Todd asked Sanders if drones or special forces would play a role in his counter-terror plans.

“All of that and more,” Sanders said. “Look, a drone is a weapon. When it works badly, it is terrible and it is counterproductive. When you blow up a facility or a building which kills women and children, you know what? … It’s terrible.”

A Yemeni boy (C) walks past a mural depicting a US drone and reading ‘ Why did you kill my family’ on December 13, 2013 in Yemen’s capital Sanaa.

Collateral damage by drones is not only terrible, but the very use of drones has been shown to lower the threshold for use of force, as demonstrated by a recent study by two U.S. academics.

In ‘The Ethics of Drone Strikes: Does Reducing the Cost of Conflict Encourage War?’ James Walsh and Marcus Schulzke report on how public attitudes towards the use of armed force change when unmanned drones are used in comparison to the deployment of other types of force. Analysis of the results show, write Walsh and Schulzke, “that participants are more willing to support the use of force when it involves drone strikes.”

This in turn makes U.S. military intervention more likely, as it does the inevitable collateral damage and war crimes that go along with it.

Besides drone strikes, it also appears that Sanders is committed to a Middle East policy that would empower one of the world’s worst human rights abusers to take a leading role in the region.

Saudi Arabia, despite its record as an egregious violator of human rights both at home and in neighboring countries such as Bahrain and Yemen, has long relied on the United States as its leading arms supplier.

As explained in a Congressional Research Service background paper published earlier this month:

Obama Administration officials have referred to the Saudi government as an important regional partner, and U.S. arms sales and related security cooperation programs have continued with congressional oversight. Since October 2010, Congress has been notified of proposed sales to Saudi Arabia of fighter aircraft, helicopters, naval vessels, missile defense systems, missiles, bombs, armored vehicles, and related equipment and services, with a potential value of more than $100 billion.

Since March 2015, the U.S.-trained Saudi military has used U.S.-origin weaponry, U.S. logistical assistance, and shared intelligence to carry out strikes in Yemen. Some Members of Congress have expressed skepticism about Saudi leaders’ commitment to combating extremism and the extent to which they share U.S. policy priorities. Nevertheless, U.S.-Saudi counterterrorism ties reportedly remain close, and Saudi forces have participated in some coalition strikes on Islamic State targets in Syria since 2014.

Thousands of civilians have been killed by coalition airstrikes since March of last year, according to the UN, and Human Rights Watch field investigations have uncovered evidence that many airstrikes were unlawfully indiscriminate, hitting residential homes, markets, healthcare facilities, and schools where there was no military target.

To make matters worse, Saudi Arabia has been dropping cluster bombs on residential neighborhoods, which HRW describes as “serious violations of the laws of war” due to “the inherently indiscriminate nature of cluster munitions.”

“The deliberate or reckless use of cluster munitions in populated areas amounts to a war crime,” HRW said in a statement last month.

Despite these violations, Sanders has urged Saudi Arabia to become more involved in the fight against ISIS, specifically stating that the brutal dictators of Riyadh should “get their hands dirty” – prompting peace activist David Swanson to ask, “Who has dirtier hands than Saudi Arabia?”

While Sanders is still probably the least likely of the U.S. presidential contenders to embrace war crimes should he win the election this November – and certainly deserves points for calling out Hillary Clinton’s friendly relationship with Henry Kissinger, one of the most notorious American war criminals of the 20th century – he should keep in mind that even enabling atrocities of a third party such as Saudi Arabia can make a president culpable for these crimes.

According to the International Law Commission (ILC), the official UN body that codifies customary international law,

A State which aids or assists another State in the commission of an internationally wrongful act by the latter is internationally responsible for doing so if: (a) that State does so with knowledge of the circumstances of the internationally wrongful act; and (b) the act would be internationally wrongful if committed by that State” (Article 16 of the International Law Commission, “Articles on Responsibility of States for Internationally Wrongful Acts,” (2001) which were commended by the General Assembly, A/RES/56/83).

Further, the U.S. Foreign Assistance Act stipulates that “no security assistance may be provided to any country the government of which engages in a consistent pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights” and the Arms Export Control Act  authorizes the supply of U.S. military equipment and training only for lawful purposes of internal security, “legitimate self-defense,” or participation in UN peacekeeping operations or other operations consistent with the UN Charter.

If Sanders wants to truly distinguish himself from Clinton – not to mention the blood-thirsty would-be war criminals on the Republican side – he should make clear that he would not only refrain from torture and wars of aggression, but also the enabling of war crimes by dubious allies such as Saudi Arabia, or for that matter Israel.

To add your name to a petition calling on the United States and other governments of the world to stop providing Saudi Arabia with weaponry until the Saudi government ends its military aggression and abuse of human rights, click here.