'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

"Justice" and politics

I long ago concluded that "justice" is always, inescapably, a highly political matter. Including-- perhaps especially-- the workings of criminal courts, which for some reason so many western liberals seem to completely conflate with the idea of "justice" simpliciter.

A criminal court, remember, is always established, funded, and supported (or not) within a specific political context. I suppose that it is the de-contextualization of these aspects of a criminal court's operations that allows so many people in the western rights movement to believe that the operation of such courts can ever be completely a-political.

Where a political system is well-constituted, and its leadership accountable, the courts can be reasonably-- but never perfectly-- fair. But today, on both sides of the US-Iraqi divide, we have highly politicized criminal-court proceedings carrying on, both of which are 100% products of the Bush administration's divisive, "GWOT" approach to the world. Why should anyone be surprised that these court systems are lousy with politicization, corruption, and abuse?

In Iraq, the work of the US-created, and US-manipulated "Iraqi Special tribunal" grinds on. Now, 16 months after the horrendous travesty of the Saddam execution, we have former Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz, and others, being tried on charges of involvement in the execution of 43 merchants accused in 1992 of having hoarded foodstuffs in Baghdad. That was, let's not forget, a time when western-imposed sanctions were starting to bite in Iraq. Actually, since politically-imposed starvation is now occurring on a wider and more visible basis once again in many developing countries, a number of those countries may soon resort to the death penalty for foodstuff speculators. I am not quite sure how such executions-- inhumane though they, like all executions, including those regularly carried out in the USA, are-- rise to the level of an atrocity, as such? Nor am I clear what kind of criminal responsibility Tariq Aziz bears for them...

("Grotian Moment", anyone?)

And 8,000 miles away from Baghdad, we have the outrageous, and equally politicized, proceedings of the Guantanamo Kangaroo Courts. Huge kudos to Air Force Col. Morris Davis, who yesterday told one of the hearings at the quite unconstitutionally constituted Kangaroo Court, under oath, that at an earlier stage, when he had been working as the Defense Department's chief prosecutor for terrorism-related cases,

top Pentagon officials, including Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon R. England, made it clear to him that charging some of the highest-profile detainees before elections this year could have "strategic political value."

I am "shocked, shocked" (that is, not actually shocked at all) to discover that this court in Gitmo had been so heavily politicized.

Davis told the KC hearing-- which was open to some reporters-- that,

Defense Department general counsel William J. Haynes II, who announced his retirement in February, once bristled at the suggestion that some defendants could be acquitted, an outcome that Davis said would give the process added legitimacy.

"He said, 'We can't have acquittals,' " Davis said under questioning from Navy Lt. Cmdr. Brian Mizer, the military counsel who represents [five-year detainee Salim Ahmed] Hamdan. " 'We've been holding these guys for years. How can we explain acquittals? We have to have convictions.' "

Davis also said that,

Air Force Brig. Gen. Thomas W. Hartmann, the legal adviser to the top military official overseeing the commissions process, was improperly willing to use evidence derived from waterboarding, a form of simulated drowning. "To allow or direct a prosecutor to come into the courtroom and offer evidence they felt was torture, it puts a prosecutor in an ethical bind," Davis testified. But he said Hartmann replied that "everything was fair game -- let the judge sort it out."

George W. Bush's "Global War on Terror" has caused our country's proclamations of support for its ideals to be ridiculed around the world. That is, in itself serious. But it has also significantly subverted the very national institutions that are intended to embody these ideals. Both these pieces of significant harm to our country will take some time to roll back and repair.

What can the post-Bush government in this country do about the scores of detainees who remain at Guantanamo, all of whom our government has subjected to significant mistreatment-- or, in many cases, actual torture. Some of these individuals have been somewhat reliably accused of involvement in serious criminal acts; but against many of them the evidence is far more flimsy, if not completely fabricated, extracted under torture (and therefore unusable in any respectable court of law), or in some cases, quite non-existent.

But we were told when Gitmo opened that these were all "the worst of the worst." That was a clear calumny.

But what to do about these individuals, some-- but not all-- of whom may be tempted to engage in violent acts after their release.

I believe that the US authorities, under any president and flavor of congressional leadership, is singularly unsuited to being able to sort out this issue. The U.N. should be invited to establish a commission of enquiry on the whole matter of the Bush administration's illegal detentions policies around the world, with a view to finding a humane, rehabilitation-based future for these men and due accountability for those U.S. officials who have wilfully subjected them to such horrendous and in many cases long-sustained ill-treatment.

Supporting a solution like that would be the very best way for a new US leadership to reaffirm, and reinstate, our country's values.