On Friday, April 17, an article appeared on the front page of the local Traverse City newspaper stating that “President Barack Obama absolved CIA officers from prosecution for harsh, painful interrogation of terror suspects,” which is to say, absolved them from prosecution for the acknowledged crime of committing torture. Contemporaneous with this announcement, the White House released four Bush-era legal memoranda graphically detailing — and authorizing — such tactics as slamming detainees against walls, slapping detainees, waterboarding them, and keeping them naked and cold for long periods. A couple of days later it was revealed that waterboarding, which now meets everyone’s definition of illegal torture, was used by the CIA 266 times on just two “key prisoners” alone. It goes without saying that where the tactics amount to torture, their use constitutes a war crime.
In issuing what in effect was a grant of immunity, the president said he wanted to move beyond “a dark and painful chapter in our history.” “Nothing will be gained,” he added, “by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past,” by which he meant the past seven years. Attorney General Eric Holder said, “It would be unfair to prosecute dedicated men and women working to protect America for conduct that was sanctioned in advance by the Justice Department.” Holder, in fact, went a great deal further when he gave assurances that the CIA officials who were involved would be given free legal representation in any legal proceeding or congressional investigation related to the program and would repay any financial judgment reandered against them.
In legal parlance, the Obama Administration has, first, contrary to the precedents emanating from the Nuremberg Trials, recognized the defense of “following orders” as an absolute bar to criminal or civil legal action against those persons who committed torture. Second, it has undertaken not only to hold harmless those responsible for torturing detainees in our name, but will indemnify them for all judgments and costs, including attorneys fees, they may incur in the process of defending themselves for their criminal acts.
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Two days earlier, on Wednesday, April 15, the same Traverse City newspaper, this time on page 6A, reported that 89-year old John Demjanjuk, an accused Nazi death camp guard who now suffers from multiple serious health problems, had been removed in his suburban Cleveland home in his wheelchair by six immigration officers. Federal officials planned to place him on a stretcher, sedate him heavily, and, together with a physician, a nurse, and a guard, fly him to Germany. He was to be deported to Munich where he would stand trial for allegedly being an accessory to thousands of deaths committed during World War II at the Sobibor Prison Camp in Nazi-occupied Poland. As the van into which he was placed left his home, Vera, Demjanjuk’s wife, “sobbed and held her hand to her mouth. As the van moved down the street, Vera turned and waved, sobbing in the arms of a granddaughter.”
Later that day, a three-judge panel of the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a stay of the deportation order. Demjanjuk was returned to his home and, for the time being, that’s where he remains.
Ivan (John) Demjanjuk was born in 1920 in Kiev, Ukraine. In 1940, at the age of 20, he was recruited into the Soviet army and was captured by German troops in May 1942. While in a German prison camp Demjanjuk, allegedly in return for some measure of freedom and security, was either enticed or volunteered to become a German prison guard, for which he was trained in the Trawniki Concentration Camp in eastern Poland. It is alleged that he later spent time as a guard at Treblinka and Sobibor where the atrocities of which he was later charged were allegedly committed. Demjanjuk denied the charges, and asserted that he was imprisoned by the Germans until the end of the war when he was liberated by the Russian army.
After the war, Demjanjuk, his wife, and his daughter made their way to the United States, ultimately residing in Cleveland. He worked for the Ford Motor Company. The family obtained citizenship in the Untied States. But Demjanjuk’s alleged past caught up with him, and after much legal wrangling, he was deported to Israel to stand trial for war crimes. He was convicted in 1988 and sentenced to death by hanging. In 1993, however, his conviction was reversed by a unanimous Israeli tribunal largely on the basis of testimony of other prison guards and the conclusion that his identity as “Ivan the Terrible” had likely been mistaken. By then, Demjanjuk had spent six years on death row and eight years in solitary confinement. Israeli authorities decided not to retry him for the reason, among others, that to do so would constitute double jeopardy.
After his release, Demjanjuk returned to the United States where his citizenship was restored in 1998. However, the Justice Department again filed civil charges against him in 1999 and again in 2001, and, in 2004 the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals again ordered that he be stripped of his American citizenship. A year later, Demjanjuk was ordered deported to Ukraine, a decision which over a couple of years was upheld all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. In the summer of 2008, however, Germany’s top Holocaust crimes prosecutor filed extradition papers designed to bring Demjanjuk to Germany for trial, and in March of this year he was formally charged in Germany with being an accessory to the commission of 29,000 murders at the Sobibor extermination camp in eastern Poland in 1943. The United States was in the process of carrying out the German extradition order when the order staying Demjanjuk’s deportation was issued on April 14.
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One can only wonder why the United States has such an abiding interest in forcibly sending a seriously ill, 89-year old man, a citizen of the United States, 3,000 miles to another country for what must be about the tenth time he has faced trial for war crimes that were allegedly committed 67 years ago, and for which he has been tried and acquitted by the State of Israel, the nation of the people most affected.
One can only wonder why the United States has such an intense interest in granting immunity and indemnification to an unknown number of United States citizens, operatives of the CIA, for the acknowledged commission of war crimes, the details of which have been documented in detail, against at least 28 citizens of foreign countries, during a war that is still going on and which crimes were committed within the past seven years, for which the perpetrators have never even been charged.
This wouldn't amount to a double standard, now would it?
This wouldn't amount to a double standard, now would it?
7 comments:
Another good blog, Steve.
I think the dichotomy between the two cases is the difference in impact. Continuing to go after Demjanjuk is meaningless. It won't change any policies, it won't open any new inquires, raise any new concerns. Going after the Bush regime torturers would expose the more recent facts that the CIA was born and raised on these methods, they continue elsewhere with US blessing and god forbid anything that would cause anyone in this country to question the morality of our nation.
I also think you should try to get your blog in the Record Eagle.
MK
I agree with Marian, and even further, your blog should perhaps be syndicated by the Record Eagle.
At the suggestion of several of you, I submitted this blog to a local newspaper. It was declined, for the reason that President Obama's recent statements favoring prosecuting those responsible for preparing authorizing the use of torturous techniques rendered my article "obsolete." I genuinely appreciated the paper's consideration of my piece, but I also wished to set the record straight. Here is my reply -
Thanks, Bob, for looking at my article. I don't quarrel with your decision not to go with it but, just for the record, I don't think my views were compromised in any way by the President's comments at his Oval Office news conference yesterday or by his remarks at CIA headquarters on Monday.
Neither time did he say anything new. President Obama has always been for drawing a distinction between those who drafted and sponsored the so-called "torture memos," on the one hand, and the CIA operatives who actually administered the torture, on the other. Since these issues arose following release of the memos, he has consistently made that differentiation, stating that he opposes prosecuting the latter (which is why he went to Langley on Monday) and saying yesterday that "it would be up to his attorney general to determine whether 'those who formulated those legal decision' behind the interrogation methods should be prosecuted." (Record-Eagle 1A (April 22, 2009))
Therefore, my point of view is not rendered obsolete. Demjanjuk obviously did not "formulate" the policy of exterminating Jews, yet he is being prosecuted 67 years later. His position was actually lower on the ladder than the CIA operatives; he was supposedly a prison guard, and no one - not even I - favor prosecuting guards at Guantanamo for the torture that was going on inside the facilities they were guarding. But it is indeed a double standard for us to grant immunity to the CIA officers and to assist in prosecuting Demjanjuk.
One other point: Obama — whom I have and continue to support on most issues — got it right when he said he would leave it to the Attorney General to decide whether or not to pursue the lawyers and other who wrote the torture memos and directed their use in the field. But that's also precisely the position he should have taken regarding prosecutorial decisions regarding the CIA operatives. As Professor Turley of the Georgetown University Law School said last night on the Keith Olbermann show — and has also said in interviews with Rachel Maddow — the Attorney General takes an oath to uphold the Constitution and the laws of the United States, not an oath to do what the president wants him to do. He is supposed to prosecute violations of the law where he finds them, not as directed by the White House. This is exactly what happened in October of 1973 when President Nixon triggered the "Saturday Night Massacre" when, following the refusal of the Justice Department to do his bidding, Nixon forced Archibald Cox to resign, and then fired Attorneys General Elliott Richardson and William Ruckelshaus. And it's also another version of the scandal in which former Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez, at the direction of the Bush Administration, ordered prosecutors in the field to hold off or pursue legal action on the basis of political considerations.
The last point, I think, is going to rise to the surface soon, for it is of great significance at least to the legal community. Separation of powers in this instance is essential. And finally, I should say that I'm not motivated by revenge against the CIA persons who administered the torture. I'd much rather see them prosecuted, convicted, and pardoned than granted immunity at the outset. “Following orders” is not a defense. Everyone involved knew they were doing torture. We’re talking principle here.
Anyway, thanks again - sincerely - for looking at my article.
Steve
well done steve...........lots more being said about it every day.....it seems to be dominating the media........ill be interested to see what rachel has to say tonight......thanks for keepin on.............sally
Hi Steve,
Your blog is very interesting and thoughtful. Personally - I think President Obama is setting up Cheney and Rumsfield - at least that is what I hope ~~ Peggy
On Saturday, April 25, the Traverse City Record-Eagle ran a short wire report from Cleveland regarding a surveillance video the Government had obtained on John Demjanjuk. It appears that on April 6, about a week prior to Demjanjuk's removal from his home in a wheel-chair, he was photographed walking, somewhat unsteadily but without other assistance, to his car which was in his driveway. He opened the door and then, as many older people do and again somewhat haltingly, backed into the front seat and pulled his legs in after him. One commentator said he was obviously "having difficulty" managing the maneuver, but the Cleveland Plain Dealer, in a scorching editorial, said that "the 89-year old con artist hammed it up" and that he should have received an Oscar for the performance.
Of course, no one reading the press reports knows the extent of Demjanjuk's medical condition, whether he was "hamming it up," and so forth, any more than we actually know what he did or didn't do 67 years ago in eastern Poland. And though I might modify my description of the manner in which he was taken from his home on April 14, my point remains intact. The point is that, even if it's a good idea to cooperate once again in trying Demjanjuk for war crimes (which I doubt), he's still being treated substantially more severely than the CIA operatives who administered torture to detainees in American prisons in the last few years and who are being given a ride. It's still a double standard.
On Thursday, April 30, John Demjanjuk's petition to review his deportation order was denied by the United States Supreme Court. Four days later, on Monday, May 4, Mr. Demjanjuk arrived in an ambulance at the Cleveland Burke Lakefront Airport where he was carried in a wheelchair by federal agents and placed in a small jet aircraft. Airport Commissioner Khalid Bahhur confirmed Mr. Demjanjuk was on the plane and that his destination was Germany.
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