14. Impunity for US War Criminals
Source:
Congressional Quarterly, November 22, 2006
Title: “A Senate Mystery Keeps Torture Alive—and Its Practitioners
Free”
Author: Jeff Stein
http://public.cq.com/public/20061122_homeland.html
Student Researcher: Marley Miller
Faculty Evaluator: James Dean, Ph.D.
A provision mysteriously tucked into the Military Commission Act (MCA)
just before it passed through Congress and was signed by President Bush
on October 17, 2006 (see story #1), redefines torture, removing the
harshest, most controversial techniques from the definition of war crimes,
and exempts the perpetrators—both interrogators and their bosses—from
prosecution for such offences dating back to November 1997.
Author Jeff Stein asks, “Who slipped language into the MCA that
would further exempt torturers from prosecution?”
The White House denies any involvement or knowledge regarding the insertion
of such language, leaving the origin of adjustments to this significant
part of the MCA a mystery.
Motivation for this provision, however, leads clearly to leadership
in the Bush administration, as the passage effectively rewrote the US
enforcement mechanism for the Geneva War Crimes Act, which would have,
upon sworn testimonies of Lieutenant General Randall M. Schmidt, Major
General Mike Dunlavey, and US Brigadier General Commander, Janis Karpinski,
held former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Vice President Dick Cheney,
and President George Bush guilty of active roles in directing acts of
torture upon detainees held at Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib (see
Censored 2007, Story #7) .
A spokesperson for the Center for Constitutional Rights comments, “The
MCA’s restricted definitions arguably would exempt certain US officials
who have implemented or had command responsibility for coercive interrogation
techniques from war crimes prosecutions. This amendment is designed
to protect US government perpetrators of abuses during the ‘war
on terror’ from prosecution.”
Joanne Mariner of Human Rights Watch adds that the effect of this provision
of the MCA is “that perpetrators of several categories of what
were war crimes at the time they were committed, can no longer be punished
under US law.”
As a whole, the MCA evolved out of the need to override the June 2006
Supreme Court declaration that the administration’s hastily assembled
military commissions were unconstitutional. That momentous Supreme Court
decision confirmed that all prisoners in US custody had to be held in
accordance with the Geneva Convention’s Article 3, which prohibits
“outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and
degrading treatment.” Through passage of the MCA, Congress and
the President negated the corrective role of the courts in checking
and balancing executive power.
A Senate aide involved in the drafting of the Senate version of the
bill that was agreed upon by John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and John Warner,
said, “We have no idea who [the extended impunity provision] came
from or how it came to be.” White House spokesperson Dana Perrino
said the stealth changes didn’t come from the counsel’s office,
“It could have come from elsewhere in the White House or Justice
Department,” she said, “but it didn’t come from us.”
Whatever the source, the amended provision was passed and is now a
part of US law.