Category: News

The historic conviction of former Guatemalan dictator Efrain Rios Montt of genocide and crimes against humanity was annulled late last night by the country’s high court.

BBC:

The three-to-two ruling by a panel of constitutional judges annuls everything that has happened in the trial since 19 April, when Gen Rios Montt was briefly left without a defence lawyer.

The defence team had walked out of the court on the previous day in protest at what they called “illegal proceedings”.

…According to the constitutional court ruling, the guilty verdict and the 80-year sentence handed down by Judge Jazmin Barrios on 10 May are therefore now void.

Human rights group Amnesty International said it was a “devastating blow for the victims of the serious human rights violations committed during the conflict”.

Montt’s lawyers had walked out in protest, called for the dismissal of the judges, tried to delay the proceedings, etc. It seems like their tactics to stall were effective, if belatedly.

See more on the trial and conviction here.

Update: Prior to this news, The New York Times hosted a debate on just how culpable the Reagan administration was in the war crimes in Guatemala. Here’s Greg Grandin’s take:

…even before [Reagan’s] 1980 election, two retired generals, who played prominent roles in Reagan’s campaign, reportedly traveled to Central America and told Guatemalan officials that “Mr. Reagan recognizes that a good deal of dirty work has to be done.”

Once in office, Reagan, continued to supply munitions and training to the Guatemalan army, despite a ban on military aid imposed by the Carter administration (existing contracts were exempt from the ban). And economic aid continued to flow, increasing to $104 million in 1986, from $11 million in 1980, nearly all of it going to the rural western highlands, where the Mayan victims of the genocide lived.

This aid helped the Guatemalan military implement a key part of its counterinsurgency campaign: following the massacres, soldiers herded survivors into “model villages,” detention camps really, where they used food and other material supplied by the U.S. Agency for International Development to establish control.

And Reagan was consistent in his moral backing for Guatemala’s genocidaires. On Dec. 5, 1982, for instance, he met with Rios Montt in Honduras and said he was “a man of great integrity” and “totally dedicated to democracy.”

Just 10 days before this meeting, one declassified U.S. document reveals that the State Department had been informed of a “well-founded allegation of a large-scale killing of Indian men, women and children in a remote area by the Guatemalan army.”

Other declassified documents reveal that the White House was less concerned with the massacres than with their effectiveness, or with countering the bad publicitystemming from reports of the atrocities.

The day after Reagan’s endorsement, Guatemalan soldiers arrived at a village called Dos Erres and started killing. The slaughter went on for three days and by the time it was over at least 162 people, including many children, were dead.

The New York Times’ Disunion series has an excellent essay on Nathaniel Hawthorne by Cynthia Wachtell, author of “War No More: The Antiwar Impulse in American Literature, 1861-1914.” In 1863, Hawthorne wrote to an English friend: “The war-party here do not look upon me as a reliably loyal man, and, in fact, I have been publicly accused of treasonable sympathies.”

The article notes: “In Concord, where Hawthorne moved in 1860 after spending seven years abroad, he found himself out of step with his old friends Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau (who died in May 1862), as well as others of his neighbors.” There was perhaps more enthusiasm for going to war in Massachusetts than in any other northern state. While Ralph Waldo Emerson initially supported the war, he made sure that his son was not conscripted into the Union meat-grinder. Hawthorne, in an essay he wrote after spending time in Washington, DC, and Virginia, scoffed at the glorification of the conflict. Wachtell notes: “Hawthorne tramples on the era’s well-respected literary conventions and proprieties: he does not adopt a strident tone of Union partisanship. He does not offer mournful lines about the deaths of brave and beautiful soldiers. He does not deliver the sort of rousing or circumspect reporting that routinely filled Northern newspapers and magazines.”

“Hawthorne refused to adhere to the restrained and respectful norms of wartime writing, and he expressed none of the standard wartime pieties. Instead, he used black humor to devastating effect. Describing battlefield deaths, he wrote, ‘A bullet offers such a brief and easy way, such a pretty little orifice, through which the weary spirit might seize the opportunity to be exhaled!’

“Where others saw a noble war to end slavery and preserve the Union, Hawthorne saw a questionable conflict that claimed the lives of young men, empowered inept generals, and seemed unlikely to end with a subdued South…”

Hawthorne suffered “the opprobrium of his neighbors. Acquaintances shunned him, while old friends could only shake their heads… No topic is beyond the reach of his wit: not generals, not the war dead, not even the Northern martyr and darling of the transcendentalists of Concord, John Brown.”

I have been a huge fan of Thoreau and Emerson since I was 18.  But seeing how they embraced war as a means of moral/national uplift — sad to see those philosophers go wrong. Emerson was skeptical of government – except when folks proposed that it launch a bloody crusade.

UPDATE:  A more accurate title for this post would have been “Nathaniel Hawthorne, Civil War Scoffer.”  But it is too late to change it now without throwing off any & all links.

The Atlantic‘s Conor Friedersdorf has written a good post on an unfortunately seldom-made argument against so-called “humanitarian intervention” – namely that there are huge opportunity costs.

“Almost every time someone calls for a war to be entered on humanitarian grounds, there’s a way to save more lives more cheaply and reliably with philanthropic spending,” he explains.

“And even if it’s true that doing nothing [in Syria] will result in sure death for many, the same is true if we do nothing about disease or sanitation or infrastructure or working conditions in much of the developing world,” he adds. “That isn’t an argument for doing nothing. It’s an argument for directing whatever we decide is the right amount to spend on humanitarian causes in a way that maximizes the utility of every dollar.”

Friedersdorf is being generous by taking humanitarian interventionists at their word about what drives their arguments for war. It’s fair to assume that many American citizens who advocate humanitarian intervention actually have humanitarian concerns. But for most policymakers and think-tank experts, humanitarianism is merely a pretext to justify war for other reasons.

For example, the most vocal advocates of U.S. military intervention in Syria have said all along that taking out the Assad regime would be a major geo-political blow for Iran in the same breath as “we have to stop the killing.” While the death count in Syria is horrifying, there are other conflicts currently plaguing the Earth that are far bloodier, like in the Congo, that garner no arguments for U.S. intervention. You see, for a humanitarian crisis to be worthy of an American military response, the location has to be strategically vital.

In case you haven’t got the point yet: the interests of the state are paramount, while appeals to save lives merely help legitimize the case for war.

This could hardly have been clearer back when the Clinton administration bombed Serbia under the pretext of stopping a humanitarian crisis in Kosovo. Up until that point, the number of Kosovar Albanians that had been killed probably didn’t surpass 2,000. Compare that with the tens of thousands of Kurdish separatists in Turkey who were being slaughtered as Washington sent unprecedented amounts of money and weapons to Ankara. The same goes for Indonesia, as it was carrying out much larger atrocities against the people of East Timor.

Another giveaway is that one of the requirements for “humanitarian intervention” is that it is something only the United States may do. So, as the United States was rampaging into Iraq in a war based entirely on false pretenses, it was a criminal act for Iran to lend support to Iraqi insurgents trying to oust the occupier which had literally just caused a humanitarian crisis by invading. Meanwhile, the U.S. can aid and abet the Syrian rebels and claim it is legitimate because they aim to mitigate the humanitarian crisis (the policy has prolonged the suffering, by the way).

The U.S. would have considered it a brazen criminal act for Russia to have intervened in Vietnam to help save some of the 3 million people our senseless war there killed. And it would be an outrage to any politician in Washington for China to take the lead in a humanitarian intervention against the Assad regime. That would be aggression, I’m sure the Obama administration would say. But again, that’s because geo-politics are what counts, not saving lives.

Conor’s point just adds to these arguments. If saving lives was really what John McCain cared about, he wouldn’t be advocating military action in Syria, he’d be raising money with Bill Gates for mosquito nets and vaccines.

To take an even narrower line of argument, consider the financial costs alone. Humanitarian aims were incorporated into the assortment of pretexts for both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Together, the total cost of these wars may reach $6 trillion. Think of how many lives could have been saved, how much human suffering mitigated, if $6 trillion was allocated to philanthropic pursuits over these 10 years rather than to these wars of choice. What if it were distributed to various areas of research and development in health care or technology? What might we have had?

At the very least, simply allowing Americans to keep all that money (or, more precisely, to not have saddled them with the debt to pay in the future) would have saved the lives of several hundred thousand Iraqis and Afghans who were killed in the wars and saved several million displaced people whose lives wouldn’t have been made intolerable but for U.S. foreign policy.

It is absurd to continue to apply some moral justification to the warfare state. It is always and everywhere immoral, and in virtually every case America’s warmongers kill more people than they ever dreamed to save.

According to Peter Scheer, a lawyer and executive director of the First Amendment Coalition (FAC), “the real outrage about the Justice Department’s use of secret subpoenas for the phone records of Associated Press journalists is that…it was probably legal.”

Although federal prosecutors need a court’s OK to obtain the content of phone communications (and most, but not all, email communications), nothing in the relevant federal statute (the Stored Communications Act) requires a prosecutor to satisfy preconditions or to submit to judicial oversight when subpoenaing “metadata” associated with a phone number.

Also relevant are Justice Department guidelines for issuing subpoenas to the media. The guidelines, adopted in the 1970s, contain meaningful (albeit mainly procedural) limits on prosecutors’ discretion. However, the guidelines are just voluntary internal policies, without the force of law. Even if prosecutors failed to follow the guidelines in the AP matter — which is possible, perhaps probable — that dereliction and $2 will buy AP a cup of coffee.

What about the constitution? The Supreme Court dispensed with your Fourth Amendment right to privacy in this area long ago in an obscure and regrettable decision, Smith v. Maryland (1979). The Court ruled that phone company customers have no legitimate privacy interest in phone record data that are in the hands of a third-party, like a phone company.

This should be a lesson in how the so-called rule of law can often be a sham. Legal doesn’t mean good. The government has built up an entire legal edifice to legitimize all kinds of abuse, from surveillance to police brutality.

Legal or not, this scandal has undeniably underscored the Obama administration’s utter disdain for both the press and for personal privacy. The extent of dragnet-style domestic surveillance in the Obama era has been unprecedented. Julian Sanchez, a research fellow at The Cato Institute, writes in Mother Jones that the government is spying on journalists far more often than we think.

Lynn Oberlander at The New Yorker has another worthwhile piece last week about the legality of the DOJ’s actions. Read it here.

I was asked by Al Jazeera to give a short commentary on the AP snooping scandal on their program The Listening Post. The show also has interviews with journalist Jeremy Scahill, Dana Priest of The Washington Post, and Ben Wizner of the ACLU.

Adam Kokesh got his start in anti-government activism as an Iraq Veteran Against the War. He admirably broke Army military rules by protesting the war in his U.S. Marine uniform, and was soon discharged as punishment.

Since then, Kokesh, who had a short-lived television show on Russia Today (now it’s produced independently on his website) has been outspoken on a number of libertarian issues. He’s been arrested numerous times for his non-violent political activism. Something that has gained particular attention very recently is his plan to get at least 1,000 people to march from Virginia into Washington, DC on July 4th armed with loaded guns. He and his followers have vowed to keep it peaceful and after news that the DC police squads plan to meet him at the bridge coming into DC, Kokesh said he plans to simply turn around and walk back to Virginia.

Many in the libertarian movement have caustically criticized Kokesh for his brazenness. Granted, a group of armed libertarians meeting up with DC police squads could be very dangerous, despite promises to remain peaceful. But most of their criticism seems more about criticizing civil disobedience and activism in general, concerned it will reflect poorly on their deferential image. Too many want to regulate the behavior of libertarians and keep things strictly to suits, ties, academic seminars, and writing pedantic policy papers barely anyone will read – as if that’s the only acceptable or productive way to push libertarian ideas.

The state is all about crushing real dissent and punishing the disobedient. No matter how bad things get, no matter how lawless the supposed law-enforcers become, I’m troubled by libertarians who condemn those who refuse to sit up straight and obey the overlords in Washington. Kokesh has consistently refused to be obedient – and I say, more power to him.

This past weekend, Kokesh attended a marijuana legalization event in Philadelphia. Armed with a nothing but a microphone, Kokesh and several dozen others counted down from ten to light up their joints in defiance of the authoritarian drug prohibitions. From the footage, you can see officers marching into the center of the crowd, where Kokesh was, and arresting him. According to many who were there, Kokesh did not himself smoke any weed. But he seemed to be a priority compared to the countless others there illegally smoking marijuana that police briskly walked by without any intent to arrest. You can also see from the several videos taken at the scene that Kokesh did not resist arrest, and instead put his hands up and stood straight while several officers man-handled him.

According to freeadam.net Kokesh is being charged with grabbing an officer’s arm after being pushed – a “felony assault.” The video doesn’t show any evidence of that allegation, but either way, the arrest is an affront to liberty.

As Anthony Gregory writes today, “Resisting arrest is a troubling derivative crime, whereby the state can basically push you around, and if you even react naturally (or the state says you did), it can haul you away. Putting aside problems of arrest, jailing, and the state itself, there should be no crime of ‘resisting arrest’ in a semi-free society. Either you committed a violation of someone’s rights or you did not. If you did not, you have a moral right to resist.”

Is it possible that Adam is being charged with these offenses in order to obstruct his planned march in July? I don’t know. But in any case, what we have here is a peaceful activist, a non-violent resister, and he’s been thrown in jail not for being harmful to anybody’s person or property, but for being disobedient in the face of unjust laws. The latter is a crime only to those with authoritarian inclinations and a calm respect for the police state.

Update: It’s important for me to point out that Iraq Veterans Against the War are not associated with Kokesh or his current activities, nor have they been since they parted ways several years ago. IVAW released the following statement:

Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) neither endorses nor is affiliated with Adam Kokesh’s ‘Open Carry March on Washington’ planned for July 4th. This event is in direct conflict with our Resolution That IVAW Only Use, Supports or Endorses Non-Violent and Peaceful Actions adopted August 8, 2009 and section C of our Code of Conduct which includes prohibited behavior of members as: “Conduct or threats endangering the life, safety, and/or health of others.”