Obama Targets Iran for Human Rights Violations and Shields Bush Officials for Engaging in Same Abuses
ANGLO AMERICA, 4 Oct 2010
What a stunning display of hypocrisy.
On Wednesday [29 Sep 2010], President Barack Obama announced that he signed an executive order that, for the first time, imposes sanctions on Iran for human rights abuses and targets eight Iranian government and military officials who are said to be complicit in the torture, abuse and murder of citizens who protested the results of Iran’s disputed 2009 presidential election.
“The United States is strongly committed to the promotion of human rights around the world, including in the Islamic Republic of Iran,” the White House said in a news release following the issuance of the executive order. “As the President noted in his recent address to the United Nations General Assembly, human rights are a matter of moral and pragmatic necessity for the United States.”
According to a State Department fact sheet, “protesters were detained without formal charges brought against them and during this detention detainees were subjected to beatings, solitary confinement and a denial of due process rights at the hands of intelligence officers under the direction of [then-Minister of Military Intelligence Qolam] Mohseni-Ejei.”
“In addition, political figures were coerced into making false confessions under unbearable interrogations, which included torture, abuse, blackmail and the threatening of family members,” the State Department said.
How ironic. Under the direction of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, detainees were imprisoned at secret, black site facilities and at Guantanamo Bay without formal charges brought against them. Those prisoners were also subjected to beatings, solitary confinement and a denial of due process rights and were coerced into making false confessions under unbearable interrogations, which included torture, abuse, blackmail and the threatening of family members.
Unfortunately, Bush administration officials have not been subjected to similar punishment as the Iranian officials targeted by Obama.
It would have been interesting to see if this disgraceful double standard received more attention if Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad took a page out of Obama’s playbook and responded to his policy decision by saying, “I prefer to look forward, not backwards.”
Over the past year, no single individual has done more to interfere with attempts to hold accountable US government and military officials who, like the Iranians, were complicit in the systematic torture, abuse, murder – yes, murder – and numerous other human rights violations of so-called “war on terror” detainees captured in the aftermath of 9/11 than Barack Obama and his political appointees.
Indeed, as Obama appointees congratulated themselves Wednesday for holding those eight Iranian officials accountable for human rights violations, a US district court judge in Washington, DC, dismissed a lawsuit filed against Rumsfeld and two-dozen other federal government officials by the families of two Guantanamo detainees, who, along with another prisoner, according to the government’s official account, committed suicide at the detention center on June 9, 2006.
Judge Ellen Huevelle noted in her opinion that there was compelling evidence the detainees were murdered.
But last year, the Obama administration said in a legal brief that the Military Commissions Act of 2006 stripped the courts of jurisdiction to hear lawsuits that challenged the “detention, transfer, treatment or conditions of confinement” of “enemy combatants.”
Moreover, in court papers filed in June 2009, the Obama administration said, “Judicial intrusion into this politically sensitive area by creating a damages remedy for detainees could subvert these military and diplomatic efforts and lead to ’embarrassment of our government abroad.'”
Besides, the Obama administration said, just as torture memo author John Yoo is entitled to absolute immunity, Defense Department officials like Rumsfeld are entitled to “qualified immunity” because the “Fifth and Eighth Amendments do not extend to Guantánamo Bay detainees.”
Judge Huevelle ultimately agreed.
Three weeks ago, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals sided with the Obama administration and blocked another lawsuit, this one filed against Jeppesen DataPlan, a subsidiary of Boeing, that was accused of knowingly flying people kidnapped by the CIA to secret overseas prisons where they were tortured. The Obama administration, like the Bush administration, argued that state secrets would be at risk if the case were allowed to move forward.
In a 6-5 decision, the appeals court judges said the lawsuit presented “a painful conflict between human rights and national security” and agreed with Obama’s Justice Department attorneys that the latter trumped the former.
Essentially, the decision means that victims of the Bush administration’s torture program are not entitled to have their day in court if the government believes sensitive national security information would be disclosed.
Ben Wizner, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union who argued the case on behalf of the five plaintiffs who filed the lawsuit, said, if the “decision is allowed to stand, the United States will have closed its courtroom doors to torture victims while providing complete immunity to their torturers.”
Obama’s aggressive efforts to protect his predecessor’s crimes are not limited to the United States.
Last year, the Obama administration told British officials that intelligence sharing between the US and the UK could be halted if seven redacted paragraphs contained in secret US documents relating to the torture of Binyam Mohamed, one of the victims named in Jeppesen lawsuit, were made public by a British high court.
According to legal papers filed by the ACLU, Mohamed was beaten so severely on numerous occasions that he routinely lost consciousness, and during one gruesome torture session “a scalpel was used to make incisions all over his body, including his penis, after which a hot stinging liquid was poured into his open wounds.”
In an interview with Rolling Stone magazine, Obama said that while he has been unable to close Guantanamo as promised, he “has been able to ban torture” since being sworn into office.
But Obama’s use of the word “torture” to describe what had taken place during George W. Bush’s tenure obligates him under the Convention Against Torture to conduct a full investigation and to prosecute the offenders.
The Convention declares: “No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.”
Moreover, the Convention says individuals who resort to torture cannot defend their actions by saying they were acting on orders from superiors and it mandates that torturers be prosecuted wherever they are found. According to that provision, “each state party is required either to prosecute torturers who are found in its territory or to extradite them to other countries for prosecution.”
During a news conference Wednesday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said under the eight Iranian officials’ “watch or under their command, Iranian citizens have been arbitrarily arrested, beaten, tortured, raped, blackmailed and killed. Yet the Iranian Government has ignored repeated calls from the international community to end these abuses, to hold to account those responsible and respect the rights and fundamental freedoms of its citizens.”
How is it possible to take Clinton seriously when the Obama administration refuses to prosecute the Bush administration official responsible for this?
Dilawar was chained by his wrists to the ceiling of his cell for four days and brutally beaten by Army interrogators on his legs for hours on end to the point where he could no longer bend them. He died on Dec. 10, 2002.
Lt. Col. Elizabeth Rouse, an Air Force medical examiner who performed an autopsy on Dilawar, said Dilawar’s leg was pummeled so badly that the” tissue was falling apart and had basically been pulpified.”
“Had Dilawar lived,” Rouse told Army investigators in sworn testimony, “I believe the injury to the legs are so extensive that it would have required amputation. I’ve seen similar injuries in an individual run over by a bus.”
According to a report published last summer by the Senate Armed Services Committee, Dilawar and another detainee whose death was also listed as a homicide, were killed within one week of Rumsfeld issuing a memo to military authorizing the use of “enhanced interrogation” techniques against prisoners in Afghanistan.
The Armed Services Committee report said those “aggressive interrogation techniques conveyed the message that physical pressures and degradation were appropriate treatment for detainees in U.S. military custody.”
As The New York Times reported, when Dilawar had died, “most of the interrogators had believed Mr. Dilawar was an innocent man who simply drove his taxi past the American base at the wrong time.”
Obama has also not taken steps to investigate the explosive claims leveled in a sworn declaration by a former top Bush administration official that Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld knew the “vast majority” of the 700 or so prisoners sent to Guantanamo were innocent and the administration refused to set them free once those facts were established because of the political repercussions that would have ensued.
Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, who was chief of staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell during George W. Bush’s first term in office, said he would be willing to testify under oath “regarding the content of [his] declaration, should that be necessary.”
And then there are the reports that suggest Obama is also complicit in human rights abuses by continuing to operate secret prisons in Afghanistan where detainees have allegedly been tortured and where the International Committee for the Red Cross has been denied access to the prisoners.
Perhaps the Obama administration truly does operate in an alternate reality when it comes to dealing with acts of torture carried out by the US government.
This recent notice posted on the Department of Justice’s website urging the public to contact the agency if they have information that can help prosecutors track down human rights violators suggests as much.
“If you know of anyone in the United States or of any U.S. citizen anywhere in the world who may have been involved in perpetrating human rights violations abroad, please contact HRSP either by email at hrsptips@usdoj.gov or by postal mail at:
Human Rights and Special Prosecutions Section (Tips)
Criminal Division
United States Department of Justice
950 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W.
Washington, DC 20530-0001
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The “double standards” which is expressed by the Obama’s administration continues to justfy the philosophy of “Might is Right.” I conquer with writer’s view point that if Obama was really concerned with the human rights violations, the best starting point would be prosecuting the members of the Bush administration.
I don’t think Obama can make those Iranian government officials responsible for their acts of torture when he cannot make US citizens and government officials for torturing fellow Americans and other prison detainees. How could he force such accountability to Iranians when he has not been effective in his own country? If Americans can get away with human rights violations, the more that Iranians can get away with it? It’s really hypocrisy!
Detainees at Gitmo are not entitled to habeas corpus. They are illegal combatants in the Global War on Terror. They did not fight in accordance with the Law of Land Warfare (Geneva Conventions). Even if they did follow the rules, they would not be entitled to be released until “the end of hostilities,” according to the Conventions. The idea that they somehow magically deserve rights and protections the rest of us need to be good citizens to earn is rediculous. Even in the American Civil War President Abraham Lincoln knew that in order to win the war he had to suspend the writ of habeas corpus, which is allowed according to the U.S. Constitution. Lincoln also established military commissions for civilians. Franklin Roosevelt did the same during WW II, and tried German spies in Commissions after consulting with the Supreme Court – who reminded the wartime president, that the country was at war, and needed to act like it. Well, is you haven’t noticed, the male Muslim extremists’ throughout the world have been at war with us since at least November 21, 1979, when they killed Marine CLP Stephen J. Crowley at the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan, the first casualty in the Global War on Terror. If you have noticed we are at war with male Muslim extremeists, then you paid attention on Spetember 11, 2001. The war is still on.