Chris Dodd Speaks of Justice for War Criminals

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Wed Sep-19-07 12:03 PM
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Chris Dodd Speaks of Justice for War Criminals

On the morning of December 13, 1945, my father presented to the (Nuremburg) court an argument that has an eerie connection to the present. He charged the Nazis, among many other heinous crimes, with “the apprehension of victims and their confinement without trial, often without charges, generally with no indication of the length of their detention. – Senator Chris Dodd, from his new book, “Letters from Nuremburg – My Father’s Narrative of a Quest for Justice”

It gives me great pleasure at this dark time in our history to see one of our prominent elected leaders speak so frankly about the need to hold the powerful accountable for their crimes. Dennis Kucinich had the courage to charge the Bush administration with dragging our country into a war for oil (Alan Greenspan later agreed with that analysis, but he did so approvingly) and to bring forward articles of impeachment against Dick Cheney; John Edwards has had the courage to make the elimination of poverty in our country a major theme of his campaign (for 2004 and again in 2008); Al Gore has had the courage to repeatedly criticize the Bush administration in the scathing terms that it deserves long before it was popular to do so; and now this from Chris Dodd. What a great bunch of candidates we have for 2008!

All of the above subjects are virtually taboo in American politics today. Any politician who discusses them is bound to be ignored or lambasted by our corporate news media, and indeed that has been the case with the above noted figures. They have been marginalized by our corporate news media to the extent possible, and if any one of them gets the nomination you can be sure that they will be hounded mercilessly for their attempts to remind Americans of the seriousness of the problems and challenges we face today.

Yet I firmly believe that this is the kind of talk that is absolutely necessary in our country today. Having abandoned international laws that were carefully developed over several decades with the aim of preserving world peace; having transformed our Constitution into nothing but a “scrap of paper” (as George W. Bush has said); and thus having deservedly gained the status of the primary pariah nation of today’s world, we are today in desperate need of a leader who has the courage to speak truth to power and restore the rule of law in our nation.

Chris Dodd played a leading role in the fight against the Military Commissions Act; he has introduced legislation to restore habeas corpus; he was recently one of the leading voices (along with Edwards and Kucinich) in urging Democrats to cut off funding for the Iraq War; and he has promised in his book that “One of the first things I would do if elected president would be to take steps to overturn the onerous Military Commissions Act of 2006”. Though I’ve only read the introduction and first chapter of his book so far, I’ve read enough to know that this is the kind of talk by our elected leaders that gives me hope for the future in these dark days of our nation’s history. So I wanted to share some of my thoughts about his book and the issues that it raises.

From Dodd’s new book – thoughts on the need for the rule of law

Chris Dodd’s father, Thomas J. Dodd, played a leading role in the Nuremburg trials and passionately believed in the cause that those trials represented. Nevertheless, he was very reluctant to share much of his experience with that cause with his children. So it was only after his death that his children discovered the numerous letters that their father had written to their mother about his experiences at Nuremburg and how he felt about them. Dodd explains how he and his five siblings decided to make those letters and experiences public, and how that decision relates to the current miserable state of our nation:

It was only when I began to wonder how he would react to what is happening in the world – and in the United States itself – that we made our decision to release the letters. The rule of law that my father addressed in Nuremberg and the standards so eloquently expressed at the trial can seem lost in an array of abuses, some of them committed by our own country.

Dodd speaks of the importance of the Nuremburg trials in establishing the rule of law as an international concept:

The argument that eventually prevailed was based on two powerful ideas. By trying those who carried out a criminal war, a complete record of their actions could be shown to the world, therefore announcing once and for all that such behavior would not be tolerated by the community of civilized nations. And, in giving the defendants a chance to hear the evidence against them and to defend themselves, the Allies would take the moral high ground…

People like my father set a clear and binding standard, saying, in effect, that here precisely is what happened as a result of tyranny and that any attempt to repeat such behavior would be seen for what it is. We were naïve, of course, in this view. Since Nuremberg, the world has demonstrated time and again its capacity to stun us with outrage and inhumanity… Yet there is no doubt that Nuremberg remains more than an event of historical significance – it has become a word in the language that reminds us of ultimate collective responsibility for aggression, racism, and crimes against humanity…

They understood that the ability of the United States to help bring about a world of peace and justice was rooted not in our military might alone but our moral authority… Our ability to succeed in spreading values of freedom and democracy and human rights would only be as effective as our own willingness to uphold them…

The legacy of Nuremburg then and now

Dodd describes how the original purpose of the Nuremberg trials bore fruit for many decades but is now being undermined:

For six decades, we learned the lessons of the Nuremberg men and women well. We continued to stand for the right things. We didn’t start wars – we ended them. We didn’t commit torture – we condemned it. We didn’t turn away from the world – we embraced it.

But that has changed in the past few years. There’s a sense that the world is beginning to doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism… If, for sixty years, a single word, Nuremberg, has best captured America’s moral authority and commitment to justice, unfortunately, another word now captures the loss of such authority and commitment: Guantanamo.

We may also trace the loss to a single speech of an American president, standing in the Rose Garden of the White House, trying to convince members of his own party that America should reinterpret the Geneva conventions that have defined human rights in this world for half a century. In a mockery of justice, we lock away terrorism suspects for years and give them no real day in court. We deny the lessons of Nuremberg, of universal rights to justice.

Though I feel that the above depiction paints too rosy a picture of our country’s moral authority since World War II (for example, several forced regime changes of democratically elected governments, the Vietnam War, Iran-Contra), nevertheless the contrast that Dodd points out between our nation’s moral authority before and after the onset of George W. Bush’s presidency is striking and crucially important for Americans to think about and talk about.

Dodd goes into substantial detail in describing how the Bush administration has put aside international law to pursue its own agenda. And he describes the consequences of that:

How can we expect developing nations around the world to give credence to the rule of law when our own leaders choose to ignore it? On what moral authority can we tell other countries not to detain unlawfully and torture American citizens when we fail to abide by the same rules? ….

Increasingly, our country is abandoning the moral high ground and the putting aside of weapons that inspire people… Thus I fear that each step we take from presenting ourselves as unambiguously dedicated to preserving the rule of law is a step in the direction of a less secure United States. What good is the information gained from torturing one Iraqi insurgent if doing so causes us to be despised by a million Iraqi children?

Thoughts on the legitimacy of the Nuremberg trials

I would like to say a few words about criticisms of the Nuremberg trials, particularly the accusation that they represented “victor’s justice” and thus were illegitimate. There is some legitimacy to the various criticisms: Nations are more reluctant to apply punishment for international crimes to their own citizens than to foreigners, and a good case can be made that some on our side could have legitimately been tried for war crimes as well. The process could have been better than it was, and I have no inclination to defend the death penalty, which was eventually deleted (see item # 11) from the successor institutions to the Nuremberg Tribunal.

However, it seems kind of silly to complain about so-called “victor’s justice” – as if there is any other kind of justice. A government that has no power has no capability of meting out any kind of justice, so what’s the point in talking about it. Only governments that have power can dispense justice. So, what’s the alternative to “victor’s justice”? The only alternative is no justice at all – and it’s hard to see how anyone could consider that to be a preferable alternative.

And with respect to the Nuremburg trials in particular, what was the alternative? At one extreme, Churchill suggested summary executions. At the other extreme would have been to just let the war criminals all go home. I don’t see how anyone could argue that those alternatives would have been preferable to what actually took place.

As it turned out, the main trial, referred to officially as “Trial of the Major War Criminals Before the International Military Tribunal”, involved 23 defendants. This was the trial of high level Nazi functionaries accused of some of the worst crimes ever committed in human history, including the crime of “aggressive war”, “war crimes”, and “crimes against humanity”. Of these 23 defendants, one was judged medically unfit for trial, 3 were acquitted, 12 were sentenced to death, and 7 were sentenced to prison terms of various lengths.

Beyond the above noted considerations, Dodd goes into much detail in his book to describe the great amount of care and effort that went into creating the basis for a system of international justice that would serve not only to mete out justice to the current crop of criminals, who collectively were responsible for the deaths of approximately 35 million people, but would also serve to prevent or at least to reduce the numbers of future similar catastrophes.

The political significance of the destruction of Max Cleland’s political career

This may seem to be somewhat off topic, but it’s really not. With all the evidence of fraud connected with electronic voting in recent years, there is perhaps no election where the evidence of outright fraud was more compelling than the Georgia Senate (and Governor) race of 2002, where all votes were counted electronically using Diebold touch screen machines. Andrew Gumbel, in “http://www.google.com/search%3Fhl%3Den%26q%3Dsteal%2Bthis%2Bvote%2Bgumbel%26btnG%3DSearch&sa=X&oi=print&ct=title#PPR7,M1">Steal this Vote”, describes the 2002 Georgia elections:

The November 2002 elections in Georgia were screwy in more ways than one. The state had its share of machine malfunctions … Most troublesome, however, were the results of the races for governor and U.S. Senate, which suggested wild double-digit swings in favor of the Republican candidates from the final pre-election opinion polls. Sonny Perdue became the first Republican governor to be elected since Reconstruction, thanks to a sixteen point swing away from the Democratic incumbent, Roy Barnes. And Saxby Chambliss, the colorless Republican Senate candidate, pulled off an upset victory against the popular Vietnam War veteran Max Cleland, representing a nine- to twelve-point swing… But it wasn’t just the opinion polls that were at variance with the result. The voting pattern was also drastically different from Georgia’s open primary … in 74 counties in the Democrat-heavy south of the state, Chambliss improved on his own standing by a whopping 22 points. Were these statistical anomalies, or was something fishier going on? In the absence of a paper backup, or of any hint of transparency from state officials, the question was for the most part unanswerable.

What is often overlooked about the election that ended Max Cleland’s political career is its crucial political importance. It’s not just the fact that the 2002 mid-term elections gave control of the Senate back to the Republicans and that, if not for Paul Wellstone’s untimely death or the Democratic loss of any one of a handful of very close Senate elections that year, Cleland’s loss would have been the deciding seat that gave George W. Bush a Republican Senate to work with for the next two years. The political significance of Cleland’s loss might have been much more important than that.

Dodd talks about the significance of Cleland’s loss in his book. To him and to almost everyone other politician, Cleland’s Senate loss provides a cautionary tale to Democrats about the dangers of challenging Republicans on anything having to do with “national security”. Cleland objected to some of the provisions in George Bush’s Homeland Security bill, and for that he was lambasted by the Republican attack machine for being “weak on defense”, in spite of his war hero status. Dodd brings this up as a major reason why the Democratic leadership was so reluctant to fight against George Bush’s Military Commissions Act of 2006, which essentially gave Bush the right to single handedly determine the guilt or innocence of those deemed by him to pose threats to national security, and thereby imprison them indefinitely without charge or trial.

Though Dodd himself fought against the Military Commissions Act, he is sympathetic to the Democratic leadership’s reluctance to fight it harder than it did. Forget about the fact that Cleland led consistently in pre-election polls by a comfortable margin. Forget about the fact that the votes were counted electronically with secretly programmed software and no paper trail whatsoever. Forget about the severe statistical anomalies of that election. Cleland was a war hero who was attacked by Republicans for being “weak on defense” and he lost his election. End of story. It will long serve as a reminder to Democrats not to be too aggressive in fighting against Republican tyrannical policies.

In other words, Cleland’s Senate loss will for a long time to come give Republicans cover for any manner of inhumane, unconstitutional, or tyrannical legislation that they wish to enact. That is its main significance.

Justice for war criminals

Though Chris Dodd didn’t exactly come right out and say that “George Bush and Dick Cheney are war criminals,” what he did say about the subject cannot reasonably be taken to mean anything other than that.

I feel very appreciative of him for saying what he did about it, because it very much needed to be said. If the phrase “war criminal” means anything then George Bush and Dick Cheney are war criminals, or at the very least they should be charged and tried as such. I’m surprised that Dodd hasn’t been widely lambasted for saying what he did. Perhaps the Republican attack machine feels that it would be better to just shut up and not say anything about this, in the hope that it will continue to be relatively ignored.

It would be a very great thing for our country and for the world if Bush and Cheney were handed over to the International Criminal Court to be tried as war criminals. It would probably erase our international pariah status and show that holding criminals accountable for their war crimes need not be simply a matter of “victor’s justice”, even in the world’s most powerful nation. And it would strengthen international law immeasurably, thereby greatly enhancing the likelihood of international cooperation and continued peace in our world.

Alas, it doesn’t seem at all likely that such a thing will happen. But if our Congress fails to remove Bush and Cheney from office, or at least impeach them, then trying them for international war crimes would seem to be the last best hope for holding them accountable for their crimes. And discussing the subject, as Chris Dodd has done in his book, is a very big and important first step in that direction.