http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/06/30/1333214U.S. War Crimes Act of 1996
Thursday, June 30th, 2005
Fmr. NY Congressmember Holtzman Calls For President Bush and His Senior Staff To Be Held Accountable for Abu Ghraib Torture
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In a newly-published article in The Nation former New York Congressmember Elizabeth Holtzman, who served on the committee that voted to impeach Richard Nixon calls on the public and the press to demand President Bush and his senior White House staff be held accountable for the torture of Abu Ghraib and be prosecuted under the 1996 War Crime Act.
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In the last few months, mainstream human rights groups have been calling for top U.S officials in the Bush administration to be held accountable for the torture and abuse of military prisoners at U.S detention centers around the world. In April, Human Rights Watch demanded that a special prosecutor be named to investigate Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, former CIA director George Tenet and other top officials for possible war crimes related to the abuse. Last month, Amnesty International issued a damning report blasting the Bush administration for ignoring international law and mistreating detainees. The group criticized the Bush administration for failing to carry out a full and independent investigation of the torture at Abu Ghraib and for failing to hold any senior officials accountable.
Well, The Nation magazine is publishing an article in its July 18th issue titled "Torture and Accountability." **
http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20050718&s=holtzman In the article, the author, former Congressmember Elizabeth Holtzman, writes that there is precedent to hold U.S officials accountable for wrongdoing. She points to public pressure that forced Congress to end the Vietnam war, relentless press coverage of the Watergate scandal which ultimately lead to Nixon's resignation and public demands that led to the independent 9/11 commission.
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And it seems to me that with the terrible scandal, Abu Ghraib, that we need -- we can’t, as they tried in Watergate to do, cut off the investigation at the small fry, at the lowest level. You have to look, and the international law precedence and American law requires it, you look up the chain of command. What I discovered by accident was that -- this is not a concern that I have alone -- President Bush's White House counsel, Alberto Gonzales, himself, who is now the Attorney General of the United States, wrote a memo in January 2002 to President Bush saying one of the reasons we need to opt out of the Geneva Conventions wasn't just because they didn't like the Geneva Conventions because they don't like treaties, but he said, we have to worry about prosecutions under the U.S. War Crimes Act of 1996. That, it turns out, is a federal statute that applies to any U.S. national, military or civilian, high or low, who violates the Geneva Conventions in certain ways. In other words, who engages in murder, torture, or inhuman treatment. And it's not just those who engage in it, it's those who order it or those who, knowing about it, fail to take steps to stop it. That means higher-ups.
JUAN GONZALEZ: This 1996 law is not very well known.
ELIZABETH HOLTZMAN: No. It's totally obscure. I only found out about it because Alberto Gonzales was worried about prosecutions of high level officials under it.
JUAN GONZALEZ: What brought this law about? In other words, was Congress reacting to --
ELIZABETH HOLTZMAN: What happened was in the 1990s, during the, I guess it was the Clinton administration at that time, Congress decided that it wanted to adopt laws to take it into full compliance with its obligations under an international torture statute and an international torture treaty and the Geneva Conventions. And so, it passed two laws. One is a statute making it a U.S. crime to engage in torture. It was passed two years before the 1996 law, and then you have the War Crimes Act of 1996.
And basically, what it does, it makes grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions a federal crime. Got it? Just like kidnapping or interstate burglary or child pornography, it is a federal crime. And the other thing, that's interesting is that it carries the death penalty. If death results from torture or inhuman treatment, then there is a death penalty, and that means there's no statute of limitations. That means that if any high level official violates the War Crimes Act, and somebody died, they can be prosecuted. They are subject to prosecution for the rest of their lives. AMY GOODMAN: So what did Gonzales do about President Bush?
ELIZABETH HOLTZMAN: What Gonzales did to President Bush, he said, ‘Mr. President, we have got to worry about prosecutions under this statute, and what we can do is we can reduce the possibility of prosecutions by opting out of the Geneva Conventions.’ And guess what. The President opted out of the Geneva Conventions. He followed the advice of Gonzales. And by the way, the same advice was given by Attorney General Ashcroft in a memo to the President, as well, saying that he wanted to make sure that law enforcement officials, intelligence officials and others were not prosecuted under the War Crimes Act. So, here we have two high level U.S. government officials warning President Bush that the War Crimes Act, a U.S. statute, could make high level American officials criminally liable, if they -- unless they opted out of the Geneva Conventions.
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