Global: War Criminals, Beware

"NOW FEAR IS NOT JUST ON THE SIDE OF THE VICTIMS BUT ALSO OF THE TORTURERS."

by JEREMY BRECHER & BRENDAN SMITH

[Nation - from the November 20, 2006 issue]

On November 14 a group of lawyers and other experts will come before the German federal prosecutor and ask him to open a criminal investigation targeting Donald Rumsfeld, Alberto Gonzales and other key Bush Administration figures for war crimes. The recent passage of the Military Commissions Act provides a central argument for the legal action, under the doctrine of universal jurisdiction: It demonstrates the intent of the Bush Administration to immunize itself legally from prosecution in the United States, even for the most serious crimes.

The Rumsfeld action was announced at a conference in New York City in late October titled "Is Universal Jurisdiction an Effective Tool?" The doctrine allows domestic courts to prosecute international crimes regardless of where the crime was committed, the nationality of the perpetrator or the nationality of the victim. It is reserved for only the most heinous offenses: genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity, including torture. A number of countries around the world have enacted universal jurisdiction statutes; even the United States allows it for certain terrorist offenses and torture.

SENTENCED TO SERVE 640 YEARS IN PRISON

Many of the participants in the New York conference were human rights lawyers who have been expanding the use of universal jurisdiction since it was employed against former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. In a recent case brought in Spain, for example, Argentine Adolfo Scilingo was tried and found guilty of crimes against humanity he committed in Argentina and sentenced to serve a 640-year prison term [see Geoff Pingree and Lisa Abend, "Spanish Justice," October 9]. The decision was made to try to prosecute Rumsfeld in Germany because its laws facilitate the use of universal jurisdiction.

The conference was sponsored by the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), which is bringing the case against Rumsfeld, and by the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH), a network of 141 national human rights organizations founded in 1922.

RUMSFELD, WHO COULD HAVE BEEN SERVED PAPERS OR EVEN ARRESTED, REFUSED TO ATTEND

An earlier case against Rumsfeld was brought two years ago in Germany by CCR on behalf of four Iraqi victims of Abu Ghraib, drawing largely on documents and photos that revealed abuse at the prison. As the case was being considered, a security conference loomed in Munich. Rumsfeld, who could have been served papers or even arrested, refused to attend unless the case was dismissed. It was dismissed February 10; Rumsfeld flew to Germany the next day.

The reason the prosecutor gave for the dismissal was that there was "no reason to believe that the accused would not be prosecuted in the United States" - notwithstanding powerful evidence that the officials who controlled prosecution were themselves part of the conspiracy to commit war crimes.

THE NEW COMPLAINT WILL BE BASED ON THE FAILURE OF US AUTHORITIES TO INVESTIGATE AND PROSECUTE HIGH-LEVEL OFFICIALS.

The case will draw on a powerful new argument. The Military Commissions Act of 2006, which the President promoted and recently signed into law, provides retroactive immunity for civilians who violated the War Crimes Act, including officials of the Bush Administration. Such an attempt to provide immunity for their crimes, it will be argued, is in itself evidence of an effort to block prosecution of those crimes. Indeed, according to Scott Horton, chair of the International Law Committee of the New York City Bar Association, when Yugoslavia sought to immunize senior government officials, the United States declared the act itself to be evidence of such a conspiracy.

The new case will introduce other important elements as well. Lawyers who served as advocates, architects and enablers of prisoner abuse policies, like Alberto Gonzales and John Yoo, will be added as defendants. Abuse in Guantánamo will be added to that in Abu Ghraib. The complaint will present new evidence showing responsibility for torture and prisoner abuse at the highest levels of the chain of command.

Wolfgang Kaleck, a German human rights lawyer who is bringing the case in cooperation with CCR, FIDH and other groups, told the conference in New York that he is often asked, Do you really expect Rumsfeld to be arrested for war crimes? His answer is that he doesn't expect it immediately. "But we make it possible that someday Rumsfeld will be arrested," he says. According to Kaleck, the German government regularly receives calls from potential high-level visitors asking, "Are there any complaints against me?"

Antoine Bernard, FIDH executive director, says that although there have been few convictions so far based on universal jurisdiction, "now fear is not just on the side of the victims but also of the torturers." And that, supporters argue, will have a deterrent effect on government officials who contemplate using torture.

Peter Weiss, vice president of both CCR and FIDH and an elder statesman of international human rights law, notes that it took fifty years to get the Supreme Court's Brown decision outlawing school segregation, but during all that time people kept bringing cases that eventually changed the legal system's fundamental position. "New norms are being constituted to deal with the reality on the ground," he said. "Later those norms become real, practical, enforceable law."

[andend] - Nation - Url.: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20061120/brechersmith

Get the killers in court? Why not? It'll not be tomorrow, but the tide always turns. We'll get them.

You should have seen the positive effect on all human beings who knew about his crimes against humanity when CIA dictator Pinochet was arrested in England: 'Killers United' was shell-shocked! They understood that it also can happen to them, any day... - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/yggho6

And when for instance war criminal #1 Heinrich Kissinger had to flee from France, where a judge wanted to investigate him, in Europe at least it got publicity and that was for the murderers and his co-criminals at their Bank of England again quite a shocker too.

WHERE THEY BELONG: IN JAIL AND FOR LIFE

And, nearly three years ago in The Netherlands some government war criminals against their will could be heard in court anyhow. And this mafia knows that even if they got away with it now - this was the beginning and soon the day comes when laws really are valid again, and they'll end up where they belong: in jail and for life.

This is what can be found on Internet among many other items: ''Humanitarian Bombers in Court'' - For the first time since the Nuremburg trials of Nazis in 1946, the former leadership of a western country was forced to attend court yesterday to defend accusations that their country had committed war crimes. (…) - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/662pp

Wim Kok, who had been a trade union firebrand in name, betrayed them too, and was slyly becoming the 'front man' for the managers of The Netherlands and selling himself. He was placed as prime minister and soon became the biggest 'sell out' of the Netherlands ever. At one point the mafia's bleeding of the country was getting so bad, that even Kok thought that this was sick. So he said something about "indecent self enrichment" (onbeschofte zelfverrijking) but Kok was immediately whistled back to the gutter by the 'consigliere' in The Netherlands of the Bank of England group, mr. Maurice Tabaksblatt. And Kok's remark disappeared in their memory Hole.

This war criminal and Judas Kok is now rewarded for his treason and has been named a corporate board member of Shell, KLM, ING Bank, and the Dutch Telecoms company Telfort. But the first steps to nail this traitor and the other criminals among our personal on government- and other levels have however been taken. And the rest will follow as soon as this is possible again, together with Kok and his racket in court.

THEY NOT ONLY DON'T FORGET: THEY ALSO STRIKE BACK

2005 Nobel Literature Prize winner Harold Pinter* warned loud and clear for what is happening: "People do not forget. They do not forget the death of their fellows, they do not forget torture and mutilation, they do not forget injustice, they do not forget oppression, they do not forget the terrorism of mighty powers. They not only don't forget: they also strike back."

But to strike back at those who may survive the wave of global revenge, we'll need real honest judges and courts, so we've got to rearrange some things. I wrote this below earlier, and it's good to know so we can get those US compliant idiots and judges too. They really are a very bad part of the problem and must be punished like the propaganda parrots.

THE ICC - THE 'INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL COURT' IN THE HAGUE - The Netherlands, is absolutely in it's present form NO - repeat NO! - valid alternative for Justice, or globally respecting human rights for all. The ICC never protests any of the horrible gigantic war crimes against humanity by the US junta's war machine globally going on.

WHAT KIND OF SICK SELECTIVE 'JUSTICE' IS THAT?

WE MUST CHANGE THIS TOO. - Url.: tinyurl.com/p4lxz

REFERENCES:

* Mr. Wolfgang Kaleck is a German lawyer based in Berlin. He first gained notoriety for representing German victims of former Argentine President Jorge Videla. - Google search - Ul.: http://tinyurl.com/yltmzl

* The Top Ten American War Criminals Living Freely Today - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/dvudx

* What Bush c.s. - the neocons* and their collaborators - are afraid of - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/95nk2

* Google search "Biggest threat to world peace" - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/dk2lj

* MSNBC - Live Vote: Do you believe President Bush's actions justify impeachment? - Url.: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10562904/

* 2005 Nobel Literature Prize winner Harold Pinter - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/9cyeq

* The Nuremberg principles: "Any person who commits an act which constitutes a crime under international law is responsible therefor and liable to punishment." - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/byurp

* 'The war in Iraq is illegal' - BBC: video & text-interview of the United Nation's Secretary General Kofi Annan - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/5pl2v

* Reference guide to the Geneva Conventions - Url.: http://www.genevaconventions.org

* The Dutch author this far has lived and worked abroad - never in an English speaking country - for more than 4 decades for international media as an independent foreign correspondent, of which 10 years - also during Gulf War I - in the Arab World and the Middle East. Seeing worldwide that every bullet and every bomb breeds more terrorism!

* FPF-COPYRIGHT NOTICE - In accordance with Title 17 U. S. C. Section 107 - any copyrighted work in this message is distributed by the Foreign Press Foundation under fair use, without profit or payment, to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the information. Url.: http://liimirror.warwick.ac.uk/uscode/17/107.html

FOREIGN PRESS FOUNDATION
Editor: Henk Ruyssenaars
http://tinyurl.com/gpr4j
The Netherlands
fpf@chello.nl

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US: How They Stole The Mid-Term Election

by Greg Palast for The Guardian (UK)

HERE'S HOW THE 2006 MID-TERM ELECTION WAS STOLEN.

NOTE THE PAST TENSE. AND I'M NOT KIDDING.

And shoot me for saying this, but it won't be stolen by jerking with the touch-screen machines (though they'll do their nasty part). While progressives panic over the viral spread of suspect computer black boxes, the Karl Rove-bots have been tunneling into the vote vaults through entirely different means.

For six years now, our investigations team, at first on assignment for BBC TV and the Guardian, has been digging into the nitty-gritty of the gaming of US elections. We've found that November 7, 2006 is a day that will live in infamy. Four and a half million votes have been shoplifted. Here's how they'll do it, in three easy steps:

THEFT #1: REGISTRATIONS GONE WITH THE WIND.

On January 1, 2006, while America slept off New Year's Eve hangovers, a new federal law crept out of the swamps that has devoured 1.9 million votes, overwhelmingly those of African-Americans and Hispanics. The vote-snatching statute is a cankerous codicil slipped into the 2002 Help America Vote Act -- strategically timed to go into effect in this mid-term year. It requires every state to reject new would-be voters whose identity can't be verified against a state verification database.

Sounds arcane and not too threatening. But look at the numbers and you won't feel so fine. About 24.3 million Americans attempt to register or re-register each year. The New York University Law School's Brennan Center told me that, under the new law, Republican Secretaries of State began the year by blocking about one in three new voters.

How? To begin with, Mr. Bush's Social Security Administration has failed to verify 47% of registrants. After appeals and new attempts to register, US Elections Assistance Agency statistics indicate 1.9 million would-be voters will still find themselves barred from the ballot on Tuesday.

But don't worry: those holding passports from their ski vacations to Switzerland are doing just fine. And that's the point. It's not the number of voters rejected, it‚s their color. For example, California's Republican Secretary of State Bruce McPherson figured out how to block 40% of registrants, mostly Hispanics. In a rare counter-move, Los Angeles, with a Hispanic mayor, contacted these citizens, "verified" them and got almost every single one back on the rolls. But throughout the rest of the West, new Hispanics remain victims of the "José Crow" treatment.

In hotly contested Ohio, Kenneth Blackwell, Secretary of State and the Republican's candidate for Governor, remains voter-rejection champ -- partly by keeping the rejection criteria a complete secret.

THEFT #2: TURNED AWAY - THE ID GAME

A legion of pimple-faced Republicans with Blackberries loaded with lists of new voters is assigned to challenge citizens in heavily Black and Hispanic(i.e. Democratic) precincts to demand photo ID that perfectly matches registration data.

Sounds benign, but it's not. The federal HAVA law and complex new ID requirements in states like New Mexico will easily allow the GOP squads to triple the number of voters turned away. Rather than deny using these voter suppression tactics, Republican spokesmen are claiming they are "protecting the integrity of the vote."

I've heard that before. In 2004, we got our hands on fifty confidential internal memos from the files of the Republican National Committee. Attached to these were some pretty strange spreadsheets. They called them "caging lists" -- and it wasn't about zoo feeding times. They were lists (70,000 for Florida alone) of new Black and Jewish voters -- a very Democratic demographic -- to challenge on Election Day. The GOP did so with a vengeance: In 2004, for the first time in half a century, more than 3.5 million voters were challenged on Election Day. Worse, nearly half lost their vote: 300,000 were turned away for wrong ID; 1.1 million were allowed a "provisional" ballot -- which was then simply tossed out.

Tomorrow, new federal ID requirements and a dozen new state show-me-your-ID laws will permit the GOP challenge campaign to triple their 300,000 record to nearly one million voters blocked.

THEFT #3: VOTES SPOILED ROTTEN

The nasty little secret of US elections is that three million ballots are cast in national elections but not counted -- 3,600,380 not counted in 2004 according to US Election Commission stats. These are votes lost because a punch card didn't punch (its chad got "hung"), a stray mark voided a paper ballot and other machinery glitches.

Officials call it "spoilage." I call it, "inaugurating Republicans." Why? According to statisticians working with the US Civil Rights Commission, the chance your vote will "spoil" this way is 900% higher for Black folk and 500% higher for Hispanics than for white voters. When we do the arithmetic, we find that well over half of all votes spoiled or "blank" are cast by voters of color. On balance, this spoilage game produces a million-vote edge for the GOP.

That's where the Black Boxes come into play. Forget about Karl Rove messing with the software to change your vote. Rather, the big losses occur when computers crash, fail to start or simply don't respond to your touch. They are the new spoilage machines of choice with, statistically, the same racial bias as the old vote-snatching lever machines. (Funny, but paper ballots with in-precinct scanners don't go rotten on Black voters. Maybe that's why Republican Secretaries of State have installed so few of them.)

SO LET'S ADD IT UP

Two million legitimate voters will be turned away because of wrongly rejected or purged registrations.

Add another one million voters challenged and turned away for "improper ID."

Then add yet another million for Democratic votes "spoiled" by busted black boxes and by bad ballots.

And let's not forget to include the one million "provisional" ballots which will never get counted. Based on the experience of 2004, we know that, overwhelmingly, minority voters are the ones shunted to these baloney ballots.

And there's one more group of votes that won't be counted: absentee ballots challenged and discarded. Elections Assistance Agency data tell us a half million of these absentee votes will go down the drain.

Driving this massive suppression of the vote are sophisticated challenge operations. And here I must note that the Democrats have no national challenge campaign. That's morally laudable; electorally suicidal.

Add it all up -- all those Democratic-leaning votes rejected, barred and spoiled -- and the Republican Party begins Election Day with a 4.5 million-vote thumb on the vote-tally scale.

SO, WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO ABOUT IT? MAY I SUGGEST YOU STEAL BACK YOUR VOTE.

It's true you can't win with 51% of the vote anymore. So just get over it. The regime's sneak attack via vote suppression will only net them 4.5 million votes, about 5% of the total. You should be able to beat that blindfolded.

If you can't get 55%, then you're just a bunch of crybaby pussycats who don't deserve to win back America.

Greg Palast

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GREG PALAST IS THE AUTHOR OF THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER, "ARMED MADHOUSE."

For specific advice on How to Steal Back Your Vote, go to http://www.gregpalast.com/steal-back-your-vote

You can catch Greg Palast on Election Night on the new Mike Malloy Show on many Air America affiliates.

FPF - RELATED:

Vote fraud? As Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin said: 'It's not important who votes. The people who count the votes decide."

VOTING FOR AN AMERICAN PRISON PLANET: ''THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION AS GLOBAL JAILOR'' - Url.: http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=135352

INTERESTING LINKS ON VOTE FRAUD:

* FPF - US VOTE FRAUD AGAIN: NO PAPER TRAIL IN 2006 ELECTIONS - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/gcnx4

* FPF - US VOTERS SKEPTICAL: ASSOCIATED PRESS DECIDES? - AxisofLogic.com - Oct. 28, 2004 - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/5zosu

* AP on the voting results: "Now they will rely on us alone." - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/5zosu

* AP - 'About Us' - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/5nqh3

* Dutch org. ''We don't trust E-voting machines'' - in English - Url.: http://www.wijvertrouwenstemcomputersniet.nl/English

* Voting Machines: Why Manufacturing Processes Should not be Closed - Url.: http://rpbouman.blogspot.com/2006/10/nedapgroenendaal-es3b-voting-machines.html

* Why France and The Netherlands voted NO to the treacherous so called 'EU referendum. - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/d2llj

* Stealing the votes is part of the plan - Holland already has Apartheid, which is an official crime against humanity - Url.: http://wvl.indymedia.org/news/2006/09/5288.php

* 'Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one' — A.J. Liebling - The merciless engine of propaganda has been turned on: The infamous US 'Lie Factory' - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/8ncal

*A FREE working press in Kansas? - Read the 'Fightin' Cock Flyer' - Url.: http://fightincockflyer.blogspot.com/

* Fool me - you can't get fooled again." - George W. Bush, Nashville, Tenn., Sept. 17, 2002 (Listen to audio or watch video) - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/4vovt

* FPF-COPYRIGHT NOTICE - In accordance with Title 17 U. S. C. Section 107 - any copyrighted work in this message is distributed by the Foreign Press Foundation under fair use, without profit or payment, to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the information. Url.: http://liimirror.warwick.ac.uk/uscode/17/107.html

FOREIGN PRESS FOUNDATION
Editor: Henk Ruyssenaars
 http://tinyurl.com/amn3q
The Netherlands
 fpf@chello.nl

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