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http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/07/international/europe/07COUR.html?ex=1032399627&ei=1&en=db9caee7494106a9
WASHINGTON, Sept. 6 - The Bush
administration is shifting its emphasis in seeking exemptions for Americans
from the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court, telling European
allies that a central reason is to protect the country's top leaders from being
indicted, arrested or hauled before the court on war crimes charges,
administration officials say.
In most of their public
utterances, administration officials have argued that they feared American
soldiers might be subject to politically motivated charges. But in private
discussions with allies, officials say, they are now stressing deep concerns
about the vulnerability of top civilian leaders to international legal action.
As an example of the fear, one
senior official pointed to the legal actions brought against former Secretary
of State Henry A. Kissinger in Chilean and American courts. The actions were
brought by people who accused Mr. Kissinger of aiding in the 1973 coup in
"The soldiers are like the
capillaries; the top public officials - President Bush, Secretary Rumsfeld,
Secretary Powell - they are at the heart of our concern," the senior
official said. "Henry Kissinger, that's what they really care about."
"They don't really care
about the Lieutenant Calleys of the future," added the official, referring
to Lt. William Calley, who was given a life sentence for the
But they also said protecting
top officials has always been part of their opposition to the court, which was
established this year to prosecute those charged with genocide and crimes
against humanity.
Using this new argument about
the top leaders has been persuasive, the senior official said, and the government
has won initial agreement from two key European allies to sign an exemption
saying all American soldiers, officials and civilians are outside the reach of
the court. "They weren't explicit about this, but everyone knew they were
nervous about Pinochet and Henry Kissinger," said Elisa Massimino, of the
Lawyers Committee for Human Rights.
The new emphasis was previewed
three years ago in an article by John R. Bolton, who was then at the American
Enterprise Institute and is now under secretary of state for arms control and
international security and the administration's point man for the court.
"The main concern should be
for the president, the cabinet officers who comprise the National Security
Council, and other civilian and military leaders responsible for our defense
and foreign policy," he wrote in the magazine National Interest.
"We always figured that the
Kissinger precedent was behind this outrageous position, but it has taken some
time for the Americans to admit it," said a senior diplomat whose country
is a strong supporter of the court.
Under the current system of
universal jurisdiction, a foreign country can prosecute an American accused of
war crimes if he or she is caught in that country. But the new international
court gives the country of the accused, not the country making the accusation,
the right to hold the trial itself as a first preference. Accordingly, an
American could be tried in an American court under the American system of
justice.
"If an American is ever
brought before the I.C.C., Washington has the right to take that suspect,
investigate and try the case themselves," said Kenneth Roth, executive
director of Human Rights Watch. "That right doesn't exist in foreign
national courts today."
This is why;
Declassified archives of /76 era implicate
Kissinger, Cheney and Rumsfeld for backing
By Rafael Azul and Bill Vann
Secret archives released by the US State
Department directly implicate former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and
other top American officials in backing the brutal military regime of mass
murder, “disappearances” and torture that ruled Argentina for more than seven
years, beginning in March 1976.
The 4,677 documents declassified late last month
spell out a relationship of close collaboration and support offered by the
highest levels of official Washington to a military dictatorship responsible
for the deaths of at least 30,000 Argentines, most of them workers and students.
The sheer volume of these documents, consisting
largely of telegrams, memos and cables that passed between the US Embassy in
Buenos Aires and the State Department in Washington, make it clear that the
three US administrations that dealt with the junta—those of Ford, Carter and
Reagan—were kept fully apprised of the atrocities it carried out. It was well
informed largely thanks to US officials’ intimate relations with those who
directed the death squads and torture centers.
What emerges most clearly from the paper trail
left by the State Department is that the US government was well aware that in
the name of a “war on terrorism” the Argentine regime was carrying out a
bloodbath. Clearly, Washington saw these actions as a necessary defense of both
US interests and those of the native ruling elite.
The documents were released as a result of a
pledge that Argentine human rights groups, including the Mothers of the Plaza
de Mayo, extracted from then US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright during
her visit to the country in 2000. They do not include the equally large and
undoubtedly far more incriminating archives that are held by the US Central
Intelligence Agency and the Pentagon. Those documents, which would include
cables sent by US military and intelligence officers most intimately involved
in the bloody work of the dictatorship, remain classified.
The diplomatic language of the State Department
partially masks the extent of the US role in Argentina. The real character of US
involvement emerges at times in the form of friction between career diplomats
in Buenos Aires attempting to preach human rights to the military dictators and
those in the key power positions in Washington, who were urging the military to
continue the repression.
Among the most telling documents was an October
1976 cable sent by US Ambassador Richard Hill to the State Department
concerning the “euphoric” reaction of Argentina’s Foreign Minister, Admiral
César Guzzetti, following a visit to Washington where he held talks with
Kissinger, who was then secretary of state, Vice President Nelson Rockefeller,
and other officials.
Hill recounted separate conversations in which
both Kissinger and Rockefeller declared that they “understood” the repressive
methods being employed by the junta and asked only that the dictatorship “get
the terrorist problem under control as quickly as possible.”
Other officials gave friendly advice, warning
that the military should avoid repression against the Catholic Church and rein
in a substantial neo-Nazi faction in its ranks that engaged in blatant
anti-Semitic attacks and hung swastikas and other fascist symbols in prisons
and torture chambers.
“Guzzetti went to the US fully expecting to hear
some strong, firm, direct warnings on his government’s human rights practices.”
However, the ambassador wrote, “Rather than that, he has returned in a state of
jubilation, convinced that there is no real problem with the [US government]
over this issue.”
The State Department’s top official on Latin
America at the time, Harry Schlaudeman, later described the cable as a “bitter
criticism” of Kissinger’s role.
On the eve of Guzzetti’s visit, Ambassador Hill
had sent another message to the State Department saying that he had stressed with
the Argentine admiral that “murdering priests and dumping 47 bodies in the
street in one day could not be seen in context of defeating the terrorists
quickly; on the contrary, such acts were probably counterproductive.”
The conversations in Washington echoed the
message delivered by Kissinger at a meeting of the Organization of American
States in Santiago, Chile four months earlier. At the time, several hundred
workers, intellectuals, students and others whom the dictatorship perceived as
“subversives” were “disappearing” weekly, picked up by military “task forces”
and sent to clandestine concentration camps where they were tortured and
murdered. It was Guzzetti who then raised the human rights issue with
Kissinger. According to a previously released cable, Kissinger responded by
asking how much longer the reign of terror would continue. When Guzzetti
promised that the “terrorist problem” would be eliminated within six months,
the secretary of state expressed approval.
The declassified files demonstrate that when
Kissinger and other top US officials gave the green light to the Argentine
junta they were well aware of both the military’s methods and its aims.
Many of the documents include sickening
descriptions of the torture employed by the Argentine military against its
captives. A 1979 embassy memo cites a report listing “cigarette burns ...
sexual abuse, rape ... removing teeth, fingernails and eyes ... burning with
boiling water, oil and acid, and even castration” as techniques used by
Washington’s ally.
Also forwarded to Washington by the embassy was
a 1977 statement smuggled out of a women’s prison detailing the fiendish sadism
of the regime. It describes a process involving “days or months submitted to
the torture of the electric “picana” [prod], suffocation by immersion,
violation by the torturers or by mechanical means, the introduction of rats and
spiders into our vaginas, bitten by dogs, watching our relatives or our
companions die by torture, losing the children in our wombs.”
Other reports describe pregnant women beaten
with rifle butts until they miscarried, mothers forced to watch their children
tortured and babies seized at birth from their mothers, who were then executed.
This is what Kissinger and Co. sanctioned, as long as the process was completed
quickly.
US officials also wrote memos making it clear
that under the cover of a battle against “subversion,” the main aim of the
junta was to break the back of the Argentine working class. One such document
drafted for Kissinger by his aide Shlaudeman in August 1976 compared the
“national developmental” aims of the military regime with the ideology of
Nazism:
“National developmentalism has obvious and
bothersome parallels to National Socialism. Opponents of the military regimes call
them fascistic. It is an effective pejorative, the more so because it can be
said to be technically accurate ... to recover economically, they must break
the power of traditional structures, and especially of the labor movement...”
And, while US officials warned the junta against
torturing nuns and engaging in overt acts of anti-Semitic terror, it had no
qualms about the repression unleashed against the working class. Within a month
of the Shlaudeman memo, the military brutally intervened to suppress a strike
wave by auto workers, including a strike at the Ford Plant at General Pacheco,
near Buenos Aires, which later became one of the military torture centers.
Despite having decreed long prison sentences for strikers and strike leaders,
the authorities made little use of the legal system. Instead, the junta used a
terror campaign of kidnapping, torture and summary executions to suppress
working class resistance.
A March 1978 report from the Buenos Aires
embassy estimated the number of disappeared at between 12,000 and 17,000.
According to the embassy’s estimate, the largest share of those abducted and
killed consisted of rank-and-file workers and union activists picked up for
strike activities. The document put the number between 3,750 and 5,000 workers.
In many cases, workers’ family members were kidnapped as well. The second
largest category of disappeared listed in the document consisted of some 3,000
family members.
The memo drafted by Shlaudeman also detailed the
creation of “Operation Condor,” an organized collaboration between the secret
police of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay and Bolivia in capturing
and executing political opponents across national borders. Each of these
military regimes had overthrown constitutionally elected governments with the
active collaboration of the CIA and US State Department. Under Condor,
opponents of the military repression were kidnapped and “disappeared” in
combined transnational operations, which included the use of death squads to
assassinate opponents anywhere in the world.
The most infamous of these operations was
carried out in the streets of Washington DC, with the car bomb assassination of
former Chilean Foreign Minister Orlando Letelier and US aide Ronni Moffit in
September 1976.
The documents indicate that the Carter
administration (1977-1980) expressed some disquiet within over the junta’s
policies, publicly emphasizing the issue of “human rights.” As two documents
from 1978 make clear, however, the central concern was that the indiscriminate
repression could provoke a backlash, destabilizing Argentina.
A report dated March 1, 1978 acknowledges that
naked bodies of missing victims, decapitated and with their hands cut off, had
washed up on Rio de la Plata beaches. A memo sent two weeks later contains
warnings from the Buenos Aires ambassador that the repression could radicalize
sections of Argentine society around the demand that a list of the disappeared
be produced. However, it recommends that the US continue supporting the
dictatorship based on the spurious contention that its human rights record was
improving.
As other documents make clear, the decline in
the number of disappearances merely reflected the thoroughness of the
repression during the first two years of the dictatorship. A February 1979
review of the events of the previous year indicates that the number of
kidnappings in 1978 had diminished because of “the scarcity of targets after
two years of wide-scale repression.”
In the summer of 1977, the US Senate passed
legislation prohibiting military aid to Argentina if by 1979 the regime had not
improved its human rights record. One of the documents released—a letter to
Secretary of State Cyrus Vance from Senator Edward Kennedy—suggests that the
Carter administration was skirting the law by rushing to transfer military
equipment to the junta before the legal deadline
A July 1977 memo from the Buenos Aires Embassy
to Assistant Secretary of State Terrence Todmann on the eve of his visit to the
Argentine junta spells out the attitude of the Carter administration. It
advised Todmann to tell the dictators that the US was “encouraged by Argentine
official statements that the war against terrorism is well along toward
winning.”
It added, however, that he should tell the junta
that “what distresses many of Argentina’s friends are the dramatic
disappearances,” citing the case of the abduction of a former ambassador. It
expressed no such concern for the thousands of disappeared workers and
leftists. Finally, it recommended praise for the junta’s economic policy,
declaring “our appreciation of the stabilization taking place.... We are
encouraged by improvement in the climate for foreign investments.”
With the coming to power of the Reagan
administration in 1981, new and closer relations were forged with the Argentine
junta, which was recruited to provide training and assistance to the CIA-backed
“contra” mercenaries in their attack on Nicaragua and to join in other
counterrevolutionary operations in El Salvador and elsewhere in Central America.
A State Department cable dated March 24, 1981 reports on the initial
negotiations that led to these joint operations. While the US embassy continued
filing reports on disappearances and human rights violations, Washington
ignored them.
Closer US relations did little for the junta’s
standing in Argentina, however. Growing opposition erupted into massive labor
demonstrations by the end of March 1982, including pitched battles in the
streets of Buenos Aires. Embassy cables reflect growing concern about the
regime’s stability.
In April 1982, in an attempt to divert
opposition and rally nationalist sentiment behind the military regime,
then-junta leader Gen. Leopoldo Galtieri launched an ill-prepared invasion of
the Malvinas Islands, a British colonial possession. The junta believed that in
recognition of its services in Central America Washington would pressure London
to give up the islands. Instead, the Reagan administration backed Britain,
helping it carry out a massacre of virtually defenseless conscripts abandoned
by the junta on the freezing south Atlantic islands. The humiliating defeat
signaled the dictatorship’s downfall.
Included among the documents are reports from US
intelligence officers that will likely figure as key evidence in a planned
trial of Galtieri for his role in the abduction and execution of Argentine
exiles captured in Brazil in 1979-1980. The former general is currently under
house arrest.
Though many of the most incriminating documents
are at least 25 years old, their repeated justifications of the crimes of
military assassins and torturers—not only in Argentina but throughout Latin
America—in the name of a “war on terrorism” sound all too contemporary.
This is not merely historical coincidence.
Kissinger remains a highly influential figure in foreign policy circles.
Moreover, those directing the combination of unrestrained US militarism abroad and
attacks on democratic rights at home in the current “war on terrorism” had a
direct hand in US support for the hideous crimes of the Argentine junta in the
1970s.
At the time of the Argentine coup of 1976, Vice
President Richard Cheney was President Gerald Ford’s White House Chief of
Staff, having served earlier in the Nixon administration and on the transition
team that arranged the transfer of power after the Watergate crisis. The man he
succeeded in that post was Donald Rumsfeld, who occupied the same position he
does today—defense secretary—and oversaw the coordination of military aid to
the junta in Argentina and to other Latin American regimes that were using
their armies to brutalize their own people.
Together with Kissinger, Cheney and Rumsfeld
were part of the core team that plotted US foreign policy during that period.
Kissinger is today sought by courts in
Argentina, Chile, Spain, France and several other countries to answer questions
about his role in plotting military coups that toppled Latin American
governments and in aiding military regimes that carried out massive and
criminal repression. He cannot travel abroad without first receiving guarantees
that he will not be extradited.
There are ample grounds to place not only the
former secretary of state on trial for crimes against humanity, but those who
are principal policymakers in the current administration as well.
As they serve as the main spokesmen for
aggression against Iraq in the name of a “war on terrorism,” both Cheney and Rumsfeld
have questions to answer about their role in crimes carried out a quarter of a
century ago under the same slogan. In a decade of unbridled state terrorism
that began with the Chilean coup of 1973, they together with other current and
former US officials provided indispensable backing to regimes that murdered
tens of thousands and tortured and imprisoned hundreds of thousands more.
Copyright 1998-2002
World Socialist Web Site
All rights reserved
&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&
What Bush is currently proposing as a primary US foreign
policy thrust, and Congress is preparing to endorse, is a war of plunder by the
most powerful nation in the world against one of the weakest. With the second
largest oil reserves of any country, Iraq is a rich prize for ExxonMobil,
ChevronTexaco and the rest of corporate America. When Bush speaks of “regime
change” he means the replacement of an independent Iraq by a semi-colonial
regime, headed by an American stooge like Hamid Karzai, the US-installed
president of Afghanistan, which would cede effective control of the country’s
resources to American and British interests.
No amount of name-calling against Saddam Hussein can
transform Iraq into a significant strategic threat to the United States. The
apocalyptic warnings by Bush, Vice President Cheney and other spokesmen for the
administration—claiming that an Iraqi attack on the United States with
chemical, biological or nuclear weapons is imminent—are a cynical attempt to
stampede US public opinion. These claims are lies, and Bush, Cheney & Co.
know they are lies, but they know they will not be challenged by the corrupt
American media or the Democratic Party.
War against Iraq sets the stage for further and bloody
conflicts, which threaten death and destruction on an unprecedented scale. In a
recent commentary in the Washington Post, former national security
adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski cautioned that a preemptive attack on Iraq would
have a profoundly destabilizing effect on the entire structure of international
relations. Its enemies would portray the United States as a “global gangster,”
he warned. The term is more revealing than perhaps intended: the Bush
administration is preparing to launch what is seen throughout the world as a
criminal enterprise.
A program of Nazi-like
aggression
The US government has embarked on a program of military
violence and political provocation on a scale not seen since the days of the
Nazis. This comparison is neither farfetched nor rhetorical. In publicly
proclaiming the doctrine of preemptive attack—in other words, war initiated for
aggressive purposes, with barely a pretense of self-defense—Bush & Co. are
preparing to commit the principal crime for which leaders of Nazi Germany and
imperial Japan were placed on trial after World War II, convicted and executed.
There is reason to believe that Bush administration
officials are aware that they could face prosecution under the Nuremberg
precedent that the Nazis were guilty of the crime of “waging aggressive war” when
they carried out the unprovoked invasions of Czechoslovakia, Poland, Denmark,
the Netherlands and other neighboring countries. Hence the strident US campaign
to exempt American military and foreign policy personnel from the jurisdiction
of the International Criminal Court, set up under UN auspices to deal with
charges of war crimes.
As the New York Times reported in an extraordinary
article September 7, “The Bush administration is shifting its emphasis in
seeking exemptions for Americans from the jurisdiction of the International
Criminal Court, telling European allies that a central reason is to protect the
country’s top leaders from being indicted, arrested or hauled before the court
on war crimes charges, administration officials say.”
US officials cited the legal actions brought against former
Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in Chilean and American courts, on charges
that he was responsible for the mass killings which accompanied the 1973
CIA-backed military coup in Chile that established the dictatorship of General
Augusto Pinochet. A top US official told the Times that the
administration was concerned, not about American soldiers who might commit
atrocities, “the Lieutenant Calleys of the future,” but about possible war
crimes prosecution of “the top public officials—President Bush, Secretary
Rumsfeld, Secretary Powell.”
The Bush administration apes the “big lie” technique of
Hitler and Goebbels in its attempt to portray Iraq as a deadly menace. This
campaign relies on public ignorance of the most elementary facts. Iraq is an
impoverished country already devastated by American attack only a decade ago.
It is not and cannot be a threat to the United States, the military power which
dwarfs any other on the globe.
Copyright 1998-2002
World Socialist Web Site
All rights reserved