DUCKPOND

ORDERS WITHOUT LAW September 27, 2010

It is an extraordinary development for an elected leader to claim to authorize the killing of people without recourse to due process of law.

The tribal people of Afghanistan were casually described recently as “lawless”. On the contrary their bloodletting does not seem from the absence of laws rather than to the adherence to their existence. Now it seems, and Glenn Glenwald is on the case, that the President of the United States of America claims the entitlement without accountability or evidence to kill any person in the world. We keep on being told how weak and cowardly he is, but without the abject stupidity of his predecessor, he assumes the powers of a tyrant, much like a Roman emperor in the grosses manifestation. How did this come about? How this lawlessness to be stopped in its tracks?

Paul Sheehan has a wonderfully multiple tangential spray in The Sydney Morning Herald. For example he says:

As such, it is time to stop wasting Australian lives on oiling the wheels of American favour. There has never been a compelling case for Australia to engage in war after war in the Middle East, an area far from our sphere of influence or major trading partners. The image of Australia as an American surrogate no longer serves our national interests.

Even worse, we can be treated as a lapdog with impunity.

But do not forget those voters in the marginal seats. And then he says about Obama:

Where I have lost faith is with the Obama administration, another place where good intentions go to die. Obama’s non-existent executive experience before becoming President has been exposed. He inherited a whirlwind, for which he deserves no blame. But the policies of his administration, after throwing trillions of dollars into the vortex to prevent a breakdown in the financial system, are now moving the country towards division and decline.

America needed a pragmatist and it got an ideologue. Only an ideologue would divide the nation along a racial fault-line to save his own political skin. That is what Obama is doing by going to legal war against the state of Arizona over alleged discrimination against illegal immigrants. Arizona is being engulfed by illegal immigrants and the impact of the bloody Mexican drug war, but Obama is attacking a state government rather than the problem. In doing so, he is courting the Hispanic electorate.

When the housing market collapsed and consumer confidence collapsed with it, the last thing the small-business sector needed was an increase in government-imposed costs and compliances, but that is what it got in the form of sweeping healthcare reform legislation. Whatever the goals, the timing was an abomination. The same with banking regulations that have dried up lending. The real rate of unemployment and under-employment is the highest since the Depression.

Excessive and growing government debt and spending has created a profound sense of unease in US among households because they know they have to balance their own budgets to survive.

On Friday, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, Paul Volcker, described the US financial system as ”broken”. During a recent visit to Australia, the Harvard economic historian, Niall Ferguson, described America as being ”on a completely unsustainable fiscal course, with no apparent political means of self-correcting”.

Obama is never going to come to Australia as President. He only has one more year before he begins his campaign for re-election, a campaign I expect him to lose. In November 2012, the hope and charm experiment will be consigned to history.

So come the next election, given this authoritative account, the emperor will be no more, and so the claimed powers will simply dissipate and the Long War on Terror will cease.

As the President of Iran correctly noted it is all about the management of world, and if the sneer of command is simply captured in stone out in the desert somewhere, others will leap to fill the vacuum and assume the role. His call fell on deaf ears to have the circumstances and facts related to the 2001 terrorist attacks on the US investigated, not because they were a domestic concern, but because they lead to the deaths of many people in Iraq, Afghanistan, and who knows where else. The culpability for murder should not go without accountability. Facts do not change with denial, even when made by the virtuous. The murder on the high seas in the case of Mavi Marama by Israel stands.

The United Nations becomes the appropriate international body to investigate these matters. Mark Townsend reports in The Independent:

A United Nations investigation into alleged war crimes in Afghanistan should be launched to identify and prosecute individuals responsible, says a former top-ranking UN official on extrajudicial killings.

Philip Alston called for the UN Human Rights Council to investigate the “conduct of the war” in Afghanistan amid rising concern over the level of civilian casualties caused by coalition forces, including Britain, and by the Taliban. It should be modelled, he said, on the inquiry into Israeli military operations in the Gaza Strip.

In his first interview since stepping down last month after six years as the UN’s special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, Alston said the lack of prosecutions concerning alleged war crimes was a major cause of concern because of the large number of Afghan civilians killed in the conflict.

“If states are not carrying out reasonably neutral investigations and prosecutions of what appear to be serious violations, it does leave open the possibility that the international community should be intervening in some way.

“An interesting proposal, but one that would draw disdain, no doubt, would be for some sort of international inquiry into the conduct of the war in Afghanistan, along the lines of Gaza. Otherwise, who is going to do a thorough investigation and track down where the decisions were actually taken?”

Last year’s contentious UN investigation into Israel’s campaign in the Gaza Strip found evidence that both Israel and Hamas had committed war crimes. Yet the failure of the European Union and the US to endorse the inquiry triggered claims by human rights groups that western powers would pursue war crimes violations only when it suited them.

More than 1,000 Afghan civilians were killed in armed violence and security incidents in the first six months of the year, although most deaths are attributable to the Taliban. A number of instances of alleged civilian killings by British forces in Afghanistan were recently revealed in secret military files published by whistleblowing website WikiLeaks. They chronicled 21 separate occasions on which British troops are said to have shot or bombed Afghan civilians – identifying at least 26 people killed and another 20 wounded as a result. The Ministry of Defence confirmed last night that no British soldier had been prosecuted in relation to operations in Afghanistan.

The call by Alston, an international law scholar who reported regularly to the UN Human Rights Council, came as sources indicated that UK officials had been contacted by the chief prosecutor at the International Criminal Court over how the British military investigated war crime allegations.

Afghanistan is a signatory of the treaty that established the Hague-based ICC, which means that any war crime committed on its territory by Afghan nationals or foreigners is relevant to the court. Sources said the UK is among a number of Nato states contacted by the ICC as part of a “preliminary examination” into whether there is sufficient evidence to launch a full war crimes investigation.

Alston said the refusal of the US to become an ICC signatory meant that an inquiry by the Human Rights Council offered a reasonable alternative. He admitted that the controversial nature of the UN investigation into Gaza meant that any debate over a similar venture into Afghanistan would need “to be separated from the single most contentious inquiry undertaken in recent years”. He added: “The problem is that the ICC can’t hold the Taliban to account, and nor can they hold the Americans to account in any practical sense.”

Paradoxically, the US Congress might be able to be relevant to issues to the prosecution of American policy by insisting on joining the International Criminal Court and so restoring some real sense of the notion of checks and balances of power. Of course, the US Senate that would supervise such a treaty is only notionally democratic. So perhaps the problems with respect to the operation of law and order both domestically and in the wider world are structural, rather than as we like to imagine them to be primarily personal with the presumption that the character of the President could make a difference.

ELSEWHERE:

David Swanson argues that crimes are crimes. The current president is entrenching crimes from the previous administration . . . We have to turn against these war powers. . .