“Only Following Orders” is not a defence to accusations of war crimes. You’d think Obama, former constitutional scholar and Harvard Law Review editor, would know that, wouldn’t you? It seems not. CBS:
President Obama announced that CIA interrogators who used harsh tactics on terrorism suspects during the Bush administration will not be prosecuted… Even as they exposed new details of the interrogation program, Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder, offered the first definitive assurance that those CIA officials are in the clear, as long as their actions were in line with the legal advice at the time.
Even though it was wrong? Sounds like the Nuremburg defence to me.
The Nuremberg Defence states that the defendant was “only following orders” (“Befehl ist Befehl”, literally “order is order”) and is therefore not responsible for his crimes; it was most famously employed by Nazis during the Nuremberg Trials, for which it is named.
The victorious Allies suspected such a defense might be advanced, and issued the London Charter of the International Military Tribunal (IMT), which specifically stated that ‘only following orders’ was not a valid defense against charges of war crimes.
Let’s just remind ourselves of what exactly it is Obama is condoning, shall we?
With his accession to ultimate power Obama seems to have forgotten all he ever knew about human rights and the US constitution:
….now the world knows that the Obama Administration doesn’t want to fully look back to understand how it could come to pass as a matter of law that our nation would torture. The federal courts cannot initiate there own investigations or cases. So the nation turns its lonely eyes to Congress. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Sen. Patrick J. Leahy, D-Vt., has said for months that he favors a blue-ribbon “torture commission†that would truly (i.e., with subpoena power) investigate this matter. Will he now push forward with such a review? Or will he fold like a cheap umbrella the way Spain did today?
For the pro-prosecution gang, about the only bit of encouraging news came from Sen. Russ Feingold, also a Democratic member of the Judiciary Committee. He issued a release late in the day suggesting that the government’s acknowledgment of immunity and indemnity only extended to the lower-level military officials who engaged in water-boarding and not to the men who drafted those memos, men like Steven Bradbury, the Office of Legal Counsel lawyer who just two months ago so publicly trashed his fellow traveler, John Yoo, over the matter. If Sen. Feingold is correct, if he’s on to something, then this story may yet live another day. But I wouldn’t bet on that.
Those of us still hoping that the EU will uphold international law and prosecute US and other war crimes (a position so easily and quickly vacated by Obama that one might be led to suspect he never intended prosecution to begin with, but just implied he might to get votes. Oh, surely not.) are shit out of luck too, just as much as those who thought that one day they might see justice in the US are:
Spain wants torture charges against Bush Six dropped
…on Thursday, Spanish Attorney General Candido Conde-Pumpido said he would advise Judge Garzon to drop the case.
Ironically, Spain’s Socialist government was highly critical of the Bush administration’s policies in the war on terror. But it enjoys warm relations with the new U.S. administration led by President Barack Obama, and some critics have suggested that Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero does not want to risk embarrassing his friend.
“It’s a shame the prosecutor is taking this position, but not a surprise,” Boye told CNN. “They always obey political orders. They don’t want to be in a bad position in front of the Obama administration.”
The author hopes that prosecutor Garzon, who also arrested Pinochet, has the balls to resist the political pressure coming from DC and Madrid. I hope so too – but I wouldn’t bet on that.
