Cluster Bombs Used by Libya--and by the U.S.

The New York Times has a front-page story today on how "Qaddafi is using cluster bombs in civilian areas." This is an atrocity and a tragedy, of course, but it is difficult for the U.S. to raise much of a fuss about it, because U.S. armed forces have also used cluster bombs in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Yemen. There is an international treaty--the Convention on Cluster Munitions--that bans the stockpiling and use of such weapons, but the U.S. is one of the few countries that has not signed the treaty. Fifty-six countries have ratified the Convention, and another 52 have signed but not yet ratified it. Among those that have not signed it are Israel, Pakistan, Libya....and the United States.

Chapter 6 of The End of the American Century, on "Abandoning International Order," documents the refusal of the U.S. government to sign dozens of international treaties and conventions that almost every other country in the world has adopted. It is this unilateralism and exceptionalism that has withered America's stature and moral authority in the world, and is one of the factors that makes it difficult for the U.S. to resume the leadership it held for so long in the postwar period.

Jon Stewart Gives John Yoo a Free Pass

Jon Stewart hosted John Yoo on "The Daily Show" this week, and essentially gave the guy a free pass.

As Deputy Assistant Attorney General in 2003, John Yoo was the author of the infamous "torture memo" which argued that torture was allowable if the physical pain was anything less than "death, organ failure, or the permanent impairment of a significant bodily function." This memo, signed by Yoo, is available at the website of the ACLU at this link. In a debate in 2006 with Notre Dame professor Doug Cassell, Yoo apparently justified even the torture of children, in this exchange:

Cassel: If the President deems that he’s got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person’s child, there is no law that can stop him?
Yoo: No treaty.
Cassel: Also no law by Congress. That is what you wrote in the August 2002 memo.
Yoo: I think it depends on why the President thinks he needs to do that.

Torture is explicitly prohibited by the Geneva Conventions; the 1984 Convention Against Torture; the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights; the International Covenant on Civil and Human Rights; and the American Convention on Human Rights. Most scholars also believe torture violates the U.S. Constitution’s prohibition on “cruel and unusual punishment.”

Jon didn't raise any of these issues with Yoo.

Last spring week, a Spanish court opened a criminal investigation against Bush administration officials, including John Yoo,for violating international law in providing the legal framework for the U.S. government’s use of torture. (See my previous post on this).

By almost any measure, the decisions of Yoo and his superiors were legally incompetent. At the very least, their recommendations, and the decisions taken by President Bush, were violations of international law. They come close to crimes against humanity. They should be brought to account in this country, under American law. But Yoo, far from facing indictments in the U.S. continues to teach at one of the most prestigious law schools in the U.S., and continues to find a hearing for his views in the pages of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.

Shameful.

And we expect more from Jon Stewart!

U.S. #1 in Cumulative Carbon Emissions

This is why the developing countries are unhappy about U.S. insistence that they cut THEIR carbon emissions!.



See scientist James Hansen's Newsweek article on "Power Failure: Politicians Are Fiddling While the Planet Burns" where he writes that "Planet earth is in imminent peril." We now have evidence, he continues "that continued exploitation of all fossil fuels on Earth threatens not only the other millions of species on the planet but also the survival of humanity itself--and the timetable is shorter than we thought."

While Hansen supported the election of Barack Obama, he now believes that in terms of climate change, "President Obama does not get it" and that he and his advisers have caved to pressure from monied interests.

"Civil resistance may be our best hope," he concludes.

How Torture Hurts and Weakens the U.S.

Mark Danner is our contemporary Diogenes, searching (often vainly) for the honest man and using dogged empiricism to establish the truth. His focus in recent years has been on the U.S. use of torture and his latest report, in the New York Review of Books, is "The Red Cross Torture Report: What It Means."

As a followup to my recent post on the Spanish court considering criminal charges against U.S. officials for the justification and use of torture, I offer these two quotations about the effects of U.S. torture on our values and our security.

The first is from President Obama, in an interview on 60 Minutes:

I mean, the fact of the matter is after all these years how many convictions actually came out of Guantánamo? How many terrorists have actually been brought to justice under the philosophy that is being promoted by Vice President Cheney? It hasn’t made us safer. What it has been is a great advertisement for anti-American sentiment. Which means that there is constant effective recruitment of Arab fighters and Muslim fighters against US interests all around the world.... The whole premise of Guantánamo promoted by Vice President Cheney was that somehow the American system of justice was not up to the task of dealing with these terrorists.... Are we going to just keep on going until the entire Muslim world and Arab world despises us? Do we think that’s really going to make us safer?

And Danner's response to Obama's sentiments:

This is as clear and concise a summary of the damage wrought by torture as one is likely to get. Torture has undermined the United States’ reputation for respecting and following the law and thus has crippled its political influence. By torturing, the United States has wounded itself and helped its enemies in what is in the end an inherently political war—a war, that is, in which the critical target to be conquered is the allegiances and attitudes of young Muslims. And by torturing prisoners, many of whom were implicated in committing great crimes against Americans, the United States has made it impossible to render justice on those criminals, instead sentencing them—and the country itself—to an endless limbo of injustice. That limbo stands as a kind of worldwide advertisement for the costs of the US reversion to torture, whose power President Obama has tried to reduce by announcing that he will close Guantánamo.

Spanish Court Questions U.S. Use of Torture

Last week, a Spanish court took the first steps in opening a criminal investigation against Bush administration officials for violating international law in providing the legal framework for the U.S. government’s use of torture. Among those the court is expected to indict are former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and former Justice Department lawyer John Yoo, who is now a professor at the University of California at Berkeley.

John Yoo was the author of the so-called “torture memos” which justified the use of torture and argued that the U.S. should ignore the Geneva Conventions, which explicitly prohibit torture.

The United States is a party to the Geneva Conventions, and also to the 1984 Convention Against Torture, which is binding on 145 countries, including the U.S. Torture is explicitly prohibited in numerous other international treaties, including the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights; the International Covenant on Civil and Human Rights; and the American Convention on Human Rights. Most scholars also believe torture violates the U.S. Constitution’s prohibition on “cruel and unusual punishment.”

So there is plenty of legal precedent to assert that Gonzales, Yoo and other Bush administration officials—probably even the president himself-- were in violation of international law.

The Spanish initiative comes on the heels of two damaging new reports on the Bush administration’s use of torture. The Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility is investigating whether the legal advice of Yoo and others “was consistent with the professional standards that apply to Department of Justice attorneys,” according to Newsweek. If Attorney General Holder accepts the report, it could be forwarded to state bar associations for possible disciplinary action.

An even more damning report by the International Red Cross on the treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo has been brought to light by Mark Danner, in a short article in the New York Times and a longer one in The New York Review of Books. The Red Cross reports—basically verbatim accounts of interviews with Guantanamo prisoners—makes absolutely clear, according to Danner, “that the United States tortured prisoners and that the Bush administration, including the president himself, explicitly and aggressively denied that fact.”

Danner concludes, as I have done in The End of the American Century, that the U.S. use of torture not only eroded our own values, but further poisoned the global reputation of the U.S. and stimulated the recruitment of terrorists around the globe. The decision to torture, writes Danner,

“harmed American interests by destroying the democratic and Constitutional reputation of the United States, undermining its liberal sympathizers in the Muslim world, and helping materially in the recruitment of young Muslims to the extremist cause. By deciding to torture, we freely chose to embrace the caricature they had made of us.”

Of course it was not just at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo that prisoners were tortured. Jane Mayer, author of The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals, convincingly shows that the use of torture was a central tool in the battle against terrorism. Even though President Bush denounced the use of torture, the tactics he denounced were exactly the same as those he had authorized and encouraged in the extensive worldwide network of secret prisons set up to hold and interrogate suspected terrorists. As the distinguished historian Alan Brinkley wrote in a review of The Dark Side:

"it would be difficult to find any precedent in American history for the scale, brutality and illegality of the torture and degradation inflicted on detainees over the last six years; and it would be even harder to image a set of policies more likely to increase the dangers facing the United States and the world.”

By almost any measure, the decisions of Yoo and Gonzales were legally incompetent. At the very least, their recommendations, and the decisions taken by President Bush, were violations of international law. They come close to crimes against humanity. They should be brought to account in this country, under American law. But Yoo, far from facing indictments in the U.S. continues to teach at one of the most prestigious law schools in the U.S., and continues to find a hearing for his views in the pages of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.

Perhaps it will take a European court, in the end, to have him, and other Bush officials, account for their decisions. For a Spanish court to indict them will be largely symbolic, of course, since the U.S. is unlikely to extradite them to Spain. But symbols are important. And one of the most important symbols of all was President Obama’s categorical assertion, in the first weeks of his presidency, that

“under my administration, the U.S. does not torture.”

U.S. Rejects Cluster Bomb Treaty

The Cluster Munitions Treaty was signed in Oslo, Norway earlier this month by 94 countries, not including the United States. The government of Afghanistan did sign, in a last minute shift, and in the face of intense diplomatic pressure from the Bush White House. This story illustrates several themes of The End of the American Century.

Cluster bombs are munitions dropped from the air or ground-launched that eject smaller submunitions or bomblets over a wide area. They are most commonly employed to kill enemy personnel or destroy vehicles. At least fifteen countries have used cluster munitions, including the U.S.in Iraq and Afghanistan, and both Russia and Georgia in their conflict earlier this year. The most extensive use, however, was by U.S. bombers over the Ho Chi Minh trail in Laos during the Vietnam War. It is estimated that at least 9 million unexploded bomblets remain in Laos.

These unexploded bomblets are the biggest problem with these weapons. Like landmines (which are also banned under an international convention), the unexploded munitions remain a deadly hazard for civilians long after a conflict ends. Often they are brightly colored and look like baseballs, attracting children and with deadly results. A third of cluster bomb casualties are children.

Like the international treaty that banned land mines, the impetus for a cluster bomb ban grew out of an international grass roots movement. The Cluster Munition Coalition brought together some 300 "civil society organizations" from 80 countries, including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Handicap International. The coalition also includes the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, an organization that won the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize.

The convention banning cluster bombs was signed in Oslo by 94 countries, including U.S. allies like Britain, Germany, France and Japan, but not including the U.S. Other non-signatories include Russia, China, India, Pakistan, Iran and Israel. Unexpectedly, Afghan President Hamid Karzai ended up signing the treaty that bans the weapons that have devastated his country. According to the New York Times, Karzai's change of heart was particularly affected by testimony from cluster-bomb victims, including Soraj Ghulam Habib, a 17 year old from the city of Herat who lost both legs when he accidentally stepped on a cluster remnant seven years ago. The Bush administration had urged Karzai not to sign it, so his decision, according to The Times, "appeared to reflect Mr. Karzai's growing independence from the Bush administration."

The U.S. has begun to bend to international pressure on the issue, and has not actually employed cluster bombs since 2003. A State Department official told the Times that cluster bombs were sometimes more humane than conventional ones. "As an example, he said that antennas on a roof could be taken out efficiently with a cluster bomb, without bringing the building down."

Some expect President-Elect Obama to support the treaty, and his team has said it will "carefully review" the treaty. However, as London's The Economist points out,

"Mr. Obama will find it hard to change American policy once he realizes that cluster munitions make up more than half of the country's bomb stockpile."

The U.S. refusal to sign this treaty is part of a larger pattern and long-term trend of the U.S. disengaging from international law and the global community--a theme I develop in a chapter on "Abandoning International Order" in The End of the American Century. There is a long list of international treaties that the U.S. has not ratified. These include the UN convention prohibiting discrimination against women; the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child; the treaty banning land mines (signed by 122 nations), the Kyoto Treaty on global warming; and the treaty establishing the International Criminal Court, to try individuals for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. All of these treaties have been signed by the vast majority of the world's nations. The only other country besides the U.S. to reject the Rights of the Child convention is Somalia, which has no functioning government.

For each of these treaties, the U.S. has its reasons for non-participation. But the very fact of the U.S. not participating in these international conventions sends a bad signal to the rest of the world. It is a sorry sign of U.S. "exceptionalism" and is an important factor in the declining popularity of the U.S. around the world, even before the extremely unpopular Bush administration. The U.S. shift away from international law is particularly tragic because no country was more important in establishing international law and institutions (like the U.N.) in the years after World War II.

The about-face of the Afghan government is also telling in several ways. On the one hand, the Bush administration pressure on the Afghan government to reject the treaty is also part of a pattern. While other administrations have failed to participate in important international treaties, the Bush White House has gone out of its way to keep other countries from doing so. The most egregious example of this is the International Criminal Court. Shortly after President Bush "unsigned" the ICC statute, he urged Congress to pass the American Servicemembers Protection Act. This legislation gives immunity to U.S. personnel from the court. It also provides for punitive actions against countries that are parties to the ICC, but which refuse to confer immunity to Americans. For many people around the globe, it seemed as if the U.S. was asserting that Americans were above the law when it comes to war crimes and crimes against humanity.

On the other hand, Karzai's rejection of pressure from his protector and benefactor, shows just how weak the U.S. has become in the international arena. The United States, and particularly its current president, has become so marginalized that it can not even influence a country that is utterly dependent on the U.S. Washington has lost an enormous amount of face in the global community, and has little left in its arsenal of "soft power." It will take a major and sustained effort by the Obama administration to repair the damage. But it is unlikely that U.S. reputation, power and influence will ever return to where it was.