Wednesday, June 23, 2004
US abondans proposal to exempt soldiers from war crime charges
Faced with the prospect of a humiliating defeat, the United States abandoned its proposal to seek Security Council exemption for U.S. soldiers from possible war crime charges in future U.N. peacekeeping operations overseas.
Unable to muster the necessary nine votes in the 15-member Security Council, Washington jettisoned the draft resolution Wednesday following widespread opposition from an overwhelming majority of member states.
”We were told that 11 out of 15 countries had threatened to abstain on the vote,” Bill Pace, convenor of the Coalition for the International Criminal Court (CICC), told IPS.
Story.
posted by chris at 7:43 PM
Martial law is for US to declare
The US-led occupation authority in Baghdad has warned Iraq's interim government not to carry out its threat of declaring martial law, insisting that only the US-led coalition has the right to adopt emergency powers after the June 30 handover of sovereignty.
Senior American officials say Iraq's authorities are bound by human rights clauses in the interim constitution, known as the Transitional Administrative Law, prohibiting administrative detention.
But they say the recent UN Security Council resolution 1546 sanctions the use by foreign forces in Iraq of "all necessary measures" to provide security.
Luckily, the US isn't bound by any of that human rights muckity-muck.
posted by chris at 3:23 PM
Settle in for a long visit
The U.S. military could remain in Iraq for years, but with the passage of time it should be able to step back into more of a supporting role for Iraqi security forces, the Pentagon's number two official said yesterday in a hearing notable for sharp partisan exchanges.
"I think it's entirely possible" that U.S. troops could be stationed in Iraq for years, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz told the House Armed Services Committee. But, he added, as the Iraqi army and new national guard develop, "we will be able to let them be in the front lines and us be in a supporting position."
Wolfowitz said it is possible that U.S. troops could be used to enforce Iraqi martial law after the partial transfer of power a week from now. Ayad Alawi, Iraq's interim prime minister, has said martial law is possible to crack down on insurgents.
That Wolfowitz, he's such an optimist.
posted by chris at 3:20 PM
Pay no attention to the memo behind the curtain
President Bush's aides yesterday disavowed an internal Justice Department opinion that torturing terrorism suspects might be legally defensible, saying it had created the false impression that the government was claiming authority to use interrogation techniques barred by international law.
Responding to pressure from Congress and outrage around the world, officials at the White House and the Justice Department derided the August 2002 legal memo on aggressive interrogation tactics, calling parts of it overbroad and irrelevant and saying it would be rewritten.
They can disavow the memo all they want. The fact is, the memo exists. This was something they developed to redefine torture and probably hoped it would never see the light of day. Now that it has, all of a sudden they're spinning like mad. Don't believe the hype.
UPDATE: Besides, they're not even addressing the issue:
None of the documents provided by the White House governed practices at Abu Ghraib and other military prisons in Iraq . . .
posted by chris at 8:33 AM
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Tuesday, June 22, 2004
Surprise! HMOs win again!
Monday's high court ruling means patients like Calad can't seek hefty damage awards in court if their HMOs refuse to pay for doctor-recommended medical care. The unanimous decision rejected arguments that the threat of multimillion-dollar lawsuits keeps insurance companies honest, invalidated an important part of patient rights laws in several states and tossed a political hot potato back to Congress, where lawmakers repeatedly have tried and failed to pass national patient protections.
"I hope this ruling breathes new life into the patients' bill of rights debate in Congress," Calad said. "I'm also hoping they do not just sweep this under the rug and completely forget about it."
The court said HMOs are shielded from lawsuits in state courts, where juries are more apt to side with victims and recommend multimillion-dollar judgments from insurance companies.
Justice Clarence Thomas, who wrote Monday's ruling, relied on a federal pension benefit law that predates the rise of managed care and said patients may pursue claims only in federal courts, where awards are capped at only the cost of medical services the HMO would not cover.
Story.
posted by chris at 2:25 PM
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Monday, June 21, 2004
Actually, he's just a janitor for Al Queda
The Bush administration has repeatedly assured the world that the detainees at Guantánamo Bay are all high-level terrorists whose incarceration has crippled the worldwide terrorist network. Well, maybe that wasn't exactly the case . . .
But as the Supreme Court prepares to rule on the legal status of the 595 men imprisoned here, an examination by The New York Times has found that government and military officials have repeatedly exaggerated both the danger the detainees posed and the intelligence they have provided.
In interviews, dozens of high-level military, intelligence and law-enforcement officials in the United States, Europe and the Middle East said that contrary to the repeated assertions of senior administration officials, none of the detainees at the United States Naval Base at Guantánamo Bay ranked as leaders or senior operatives of Al Qaeda. They said only a relative handful — some put the number at about a dozen, others more than two dozen — were sworn Qaeda members or other militants able to elucidate the organization's inner workings.
While some Guantánamo intelligence has aided terrorism investigations, none of of it has enabled intelligence or law-enforcement services to foil imminent attacks, the officials said. Compared with the higher-profile Qaeda operatives held elsewhere by the C.I.A., the Guantánamo detainees have provided only a trickle of intelligence with current value, the officials said. Because nearly all of that intelligence is classified, most of the officials would discuss it only on the condition of anonymity.
Story.
posted by chris at 9:55 AM
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Sunday, June 20, 2004
The mess we made
The American occupation of Iraq will formally end this month having failed to fulfill many of its goals and stated promises intended to transform the country into a stable democracy, according to a detailed examination drawing upon interviews with senior U.S. and Iraqi officials and internal documents of the occupation authority.
The ambitious, 15-month undertaking stumbled because of a series of mistakes that began with an inadequate commitment of resources and was aggravated by a misunderstanding of Iraqi politics, religion and society in occupied Iraq, these participants said.
"We blatantly failed to get it right," said Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution who served as an adviser to the occupation authority. "When you look at the record, it's impossible to escape the conclusion that we squandered an unprecedented opportunity."
Story.
posted by chris at 11:00 AM
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