What if Instead of the Nuremberg Trials There Was Only a Truth Commission?

[kpete]

Published on Wednesday, April 29, 2009 by CommonDreams.org
What if Instead of the Nuremberg Trials There Was Only a Truth Commission?

by Jeremy Scahill

...............

Michael Ratner, the president of the Center for Constitutional Rights:

"To argue that we should not have prosecutions because it won't bring out all the facts when taken to its logical conclusion would mean never prosecuting any official no matter the seriousness of the crimes," Ratner told me. "Right now is not the time to be backing off on prosecutions. Why are prosecutions of torturers ok for other non-western countries but not for the US? Prosecution is necessary to deter torture in the future and send a message to ourselves and the rest of the world that the seven or eight year torture program was unlawful and must not happen again. The purpose of prosecutions is to investigate and get convictions so that officials in the future will not again dispense with the prohibition on torture."

......................

Jameel Jaffer, one of the leading ACLU attorneys responsible for getting the torture memos released by the Obama administration, agrees with Horton. "I don't think we should have to choose between a criminal investigation and a congressional inquiry," Jaffer told me. "A congressional committee could examine the roots of the torture program and recommend legislative reform to prevent gross human rights abuses by future administrations. At the same time, a Justice Department investigation could investigate issues of criminal responsibility. One shouldn't foreclose the other."

.....................

Jaffer adds, "It might be a different story if we thought that Congress would need to offer immunity in exchange for testimony. But many of the key players - including John Yoo, George Tenet, and Dick Cheney - have made clear that they have no qualms about talking publicly about their actions (Yoo and Tenet have both written books, and Cheney is writing one now)."

The bottom line, Ratner argues, is that "prosecutions will bring out facts." He cites the example of the Nuremberg Tribunals:

What if we had had a truth commission and no prosecutions? Right now we have many means of getting the facts: FOIA, congressional investigations such as the Senate Armed Services Report, former interrogators, document releases by the Executive. There are plenty of ways to get information even if it does not all come out in prosecutions. Many of the calls to not prosecute are by those, particularly inside the beltway, who cannot imagine Bush, Cheney et al. in the dock or by those who accept the argument that the torture conspirators were trying their best. This is not a time to hold back on the demand that is required by law and fact: appoint a special prosecutor.

more:
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/04/29

[cali]

1. While I largely agree with this, I'd like to point out

that if we prosecute torturers under the Obama admin, we'll have accomplished something very few, if any, countries have managed to accomplish. Spain is just beginning to investigate the widespread and well known torture under Franco. France has issued two amnesties for torturers in Algeria. Most SA countries that finally did start to deal with their homegrown torturers, only did so after many years elapsed.

I hope we can do it. I don't underestimate how difficult it is.

[mod mom]

2. Our War Criminals must be held to the same level of the law as other countries!

[RufusTFirefly]

3. Perhaps even a higher level

I know way too much history to buy into American mythology, but I still stubbornly believe in American ideals. The time has come to finally be the country that so many thought we were all along.

[peace13]

4. I agree. n/t

[mod mom]

6. I'll go along with your suggestion.

:hi:

This can't a political be a political issue, but a moral one:


"Even in the case of Abu Ghraib, it shows step-by-step how directions given by Rumsfeld that the harsh techniques he adopted for Guantánamo be imported to Iraq, specifically for use on high-value detainees at the Abu Ghraib facility."

http://www.alternet.org/rights/138625/the_stomach-turning_truth_about_bush%27s_torture_programs


The other prisoners


Luke Harding
The Guardian, Thursday 20 May 2004

The scandal at Abu Ghraib prison was first exposed not by a digital photograph but by a letter. In December 2003, a woman prisoner inside the jail west of Baghdad managed to smuggle out a note. Its contents were so shocking that, at first, Amal Kadham Swadi and the other Iraqi women lawyers who had been trying to gain access to the US jail found them hard to believe.
The note claimed that US guards had been raping women detainees, who were, and are, in a small minority at Abu Ghraib. Several of the women were now pregnant, it added. The women had been forced to strip naked in front of men, it said. The note urged the Iraqi resistance to bomb the jail to spare the women further shame.

Late last year, Swadi, one of seven female lawyers now representing women detainees in Abu Ghraib, began to piece together a picture of systemic abuse and torture perpetrated by US guards against Iraqi women held in detention without charge. This was not only true of Abu Ghraib, she discovered, but was, as she put it, "happening all across Iraq".

In November last year, Swadi visited a woman detainee at a US military base at al-Kharkh, a former police compound in Baghdad. "She was the only woman who would talk about her case. She was crying. She told us she had been raped," Swadi says. "Several American soldiers had raped her. She had tried to fight them off and they had hurt her arm. She showed us the stitches. She told us, 'We have daughters and husbands. For God's sake don't tell anyone about this.'"

-snip

Earlier this month it emerged that an Iraqi woman in her 70s had been harnessed and ridden like a donkey at Abu Ghraib and another coalition detention centre after being arrested last July. Labour MP Ann Clwyd, who investigated the case and found it to be true, said, "She was held for about six weeks without charge. During that time she was insulted and told she was a donkey."

-snip

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2004/may/20/iraq.gender

Kids sodomized at Abu Ghraib, Pentagon has the videos - Hersh
by Gryn


Wed Jul 14, 2004 at 08:33:32 PM PDT


Seymour Hersh says the US government has videotapes of boys being sodomized at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
"The worst is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking," the reporter told an ACLU convention last week. Hersh says there was "a massive amount of criminal wrongdoing that was covered up at the highest command out there, and higher."
This is a summary of Hersh speaking at the ACLU 2004 America At A Crossroads conference according to EdCone.com (via Oliver Willis). I verified by watching the video myself (it starts at 1:07, the "worse stuff" part starts at 1:30).
There's more bad stuff in here, read Ed Cone's summary.
I'll try transcribing some of the more important bits.

Some of the worse that happened that you don't know about, ok. Videos, there are women there. Some of you may have read they were passing letters, communications out to their men. This is at Abu Ghraib which is 30 miles from Baghdad <...>
The women were passing messages saying "Please come and kill me, because of what's happened". Basically what happened is that those women who were arrested with young boys/children in cases that have been recorded. The boys were sodomized with the cameras rolling. The worst about all of them is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking that your government has. They are in total terror it's going to come out.
It's impossible to say to yourself how do we get there? who are we? Who are these people that sent us there?
Chilling.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/7/14/193750/666

[cali]

5. except that most other countries' war criminals have NOT be prosecuted

and they certainly haven't been prosecuted by their own country. And even more certainly they haven't been prosecuted shortly after leaving office. If we manage to do this within the next few years, we'll have managed something very, very unusual.

[mod mom]

8. We are not "most other countries" AND we prosecuted a TX Sheriff for water boarding.

Rule of law treats everyone the same.

What does timing-"And even more certainly they haven't been prosecuted shortly after leaving office." have to do with anything?

:eyes:

[cali]

10. I'm not claiming we're other countries. I'm simply pointing out historical realities

and context in similar past situations in other countries. The Nuremberg trials were invoked in the title. I'm responding, in part, to that.

And timing is relevant because it points out how very difficult it is to achieve prosecutions close to the offenses.

I'm not saying we shouldn't pursue it. We should. But recognizing how difficult a task it is, and how frickin' rare such prosecutions have been post Nuremberg, does illustrate what we're up against.

[Political Tiger]

7. It's rather insulting to keep comparing Nuremberg to what's going on today

As wrong and disgusting as torture is, comparing it to the Holocaust is simply wrong, and that's what is being done when people bring up Nuremberg to make a case for torture prosecutions.

[mod mom]

9. not just the Nazi criminals but also JAPANESE soldiers.

[chill_wind]

11. Great point-- we're falling into the notion of a false dilemma

"One shouldn't foreclose the other". Both are crucial for their own reasons.

[TayTay]

12. What if, post WWII, they had let some Nazis go do to politics?

and deemed some scientists too important in the fight against communism to sacrifice to Nuremberg trials and such? What if certain people suspected of being involved in planning and carrying out atrocities got a "get out of jail free" card and wound up in the US working for the government against the Russians?

Nah, couldn't happen.

There will be NO perfect prosecution. There must be an accounting. Yeah that matters.