Families of U.S. citizens killed in drone strikes sue CIA

Πηγή: The Raw Story
By Karen McVeigh (The Guardian)
July 18 2012

The killing of three US citizens, one a 16-year-old boy, in targeted drone strikes last year were unlawful and violated their constitutional rights by not affording them due process, according to a lawsuit filed by their relatives on Wednesday.

Anwar al-Awlaki, a radical Muslim cleric who was placed on a CIA “kill list” last year, died in a targeted strike in Yemen on 30 September that also killed Samir Khan, an alleged propagandist for al-Qaida, in the Arabian Pensinsula. Al-Awlaki’s teenage son, Abdulrahman, was killed in a separate strike 200 miles away in which six others died two weeks later.

The lawsuit accuses Leon Panetta, the secretary of defence, David Petraeus, the director of the CIA, and two military commanders of authorising and directing unlawful killings. President Barack Obama is not named in the lawsuit: presidents are immune from civil suits arising from their official actions.

The complaint alleges that the deaths are part of a broader programme of deliberate and premeditated killings by the United States, which rely on “vague legal standards, a closed executive process and evidence never presented to the courts”.

The lawsuit has been filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) on behalf of Nasser al-Awlaki, the father of Anwar and grandfather of Abdulrahman, and Sarah Khan, the mother of Khan. It aims to force the Obama administration to disclose information about secret decisions behind the killing.

Jameel Jaffir, deputy legal director of the ACLU, said: “It is about accountability. We don’t want to minimise the seriousness of the allegations [against Al-Awlaki]. The question here is not whether people are guilty of crimes but whether the government is justified in killing them.”

Jaffir said the government had adopted a “dangerous position” over the targeting killing programme by saying that not only do they not have to explain but do not have to acknowledge the killings.

The lawsuit argues that all three killings were unlawful because, outside of military conflict, the constitution and international law prohibit killing without due process, “except as a last resort to avert a concrete, specific, and imminent threat of death or serious physical injury”.

Anonymous US government officials were quoted in news reports saying that neither Khan nor Abdulrahman were targets of the strikes that killed them.The complaint said that if the US government were targeting others, then they failed in their obligations under constitutional and international law to protect Khan, Abdulrahman and “other bystanders”.

Pardiss Kebriaei of the CCR said: “The government was quick to claim responsibility for the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki but it said nothing of the strike on the 14 October.”

She said there was something “terribly wrong that a 16-year-old boy can be killed by his own government without any explanation”.

In a video statement, posted on the ACLU website, Nasser al-Awlaki, said: “I want Americans to know about my grandson. He was a very nice boy he was very caring boy. I never thought that one day this boy, this nice boy, will be killed by his own government for no wrong he did certainly.”

It is unclear who the US targeted in the second strike, which was 200 miles away from the strike which killed al-Awlaki. The teenager, who was born in Denver, was killed when he was eating dinner at an outdoor restaurant with his teenage cousin.

Two years ago, ACLU and CCR were unsuccessful in their attempts to involve the courts in an action by Nasser al-Awlaki to try to stop the government from killing his son. A federal judge threw out the case on the basis that Nasser al-Awlaki had no standing to file the lawsuit on behalf of his son. He also said decisions about targeted killings were a “political question” for executive branch officials and not for the courts.

US officials have defended the drone campaign in recent speeches, but the Obama administration has generally refused to openly discuss the criteria for operations.

US government officials, including Eric Holder, the attorney general, have defended targeting suspected terrorists without a trial, even if they are US citizens.

In a speech in March, Holder said: “Some have argued that the president is required to get permission from a federal court before taking action against a United States citizen who is a senior operational leader of al-Qaida or associated forces.

“This is simply not accurate. ‘Due process’ and ‘judicial process’ are not one and the same, particularly when it comes to national security. The constitution guarantees due process, not judicial process.”

There have been reports that Anwar al-Awlaki was involved in the attempted bombing of a Detroit-bound airliner on Christmas Day 2009 and other terrorist plots, but he was never indicted or tried.

Hague Is Asked to Investigate Vatican Over Abuse

Πηγή: New York Times
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN
September 13, 2011

Human rights lawyers and victims of clergy sexual abuse filed a complaint on Tuesday urging the International Criminal Court in The Hague to investigate and prosecute Pope Benedict XVI and three top Vatican officials for crimes against humanity for what they described as abetting and covering up the rape and sexual assault of children by priests.

The formal filing of nearly 80 pages by two American advocacy groups, the Center for Constitutional Rights and the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, is the most substantive effort yet to hold the pope and the Vatican accountable in an international court for sexual abuse by priests.

A spokesperson at the court said that the prosecutor’s office would examine the papers, “as we do with all such communications.” The first step will be “to analyze whether the alleged crimes fall under the court’s jurisdiction,” Florence Olara, the prosecutor’s spokeswoman said.

Complaints about the Vatican and child abuse by Catholic priests have been received at the court before, court records showed. But Ms. Olara said that details are not normally disclosed by the court unless a case goes forward.

Lawyers familiar with the I.C.C. said that it was unlikely that complaint against the Vatican would fit the court’s mandate to prosecute war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. But even an examination of the issue by the prosecution office would appear to serve the plaintiffs’ goal of getting international attention for the case.

The Rev. Federico Lombardi, the spokesman for the Vatican, said he had no comment.

Vatican officials have often said that the decisions about priests accused of abuse are made by bishops — not by the Vatican hierarchy — and that the church is far more decentralized than is widely believed.

But the lawyers and abuse victims who are taking the case to the international court say their action is necessary because all the cases brought against priests and bishops in various countries have not been sufficient to prevent the crimes from continuing.

“National jurisdictions can’t really get their arms around this,” said Pamela Spees, a lawyer with the Center for Constitutional Rights, who helped prepare the filing. “Prosecuting individual instances of child molestation or sexual assault has not gotten at the larger systemic problem here. Accountability is the goal, and the I.C.C. makes the most sense, given that it’s a global problem.”

In addition to Pope Benedict XVI, the filing asks the court to prosecute Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Vatican’s secretary of state; Cardinal Angelo Sodano, the previous secretary of state and the current dean of the College of Cardinals; and Cardinal William J. Levada, who is head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican office designated to receive cases of clergy sexual abuse that are forwarded by bishops.

A central question is whether the accusations will fit the court’s criteria. The International Criminal Court has jurisdiction over war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide committed after July 1, 2002, when the court opened. It is independent of the United Nations and has jurisdiction in the 117 countries that so far have ratified the Rome Statute that created the court. Italy, Germany and the Netherlands are signatories, while the Vatican and the United States are not.

The filing against the Vatican cites five cases in which priests have been accused of abuse in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the United States; the priests in these cases are from Belgium, India and the United States.

Ms. Spees said she hoped to persuade the court that the cases were within its jurisdiction, because they involve abuses that she said were “systematic and widespread,” and because the pope and two of the three cardinals named in the filing are from nations that are signatories to the Rome Statute.

Experts in international law said they thought the court’s chief prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, would be reluctant to accept the cases because of thorny jurisdictional questions, as well as political and religious sensitivities.

They said that the sexual abuse of minors by Roman Catholic priests was sufficiently heinous and numerous to meet the court’s standards. The question is whether the facts show that the Vatican officials actually perpetuated the abuse.

Mark Ellis, executive director of the International Bar Association, which is based in London, said he thought that the court would open a preliminary investigation to determine whether it has jurisdiction — and that it would probably conclude that it did not.

“Crimes against humanity means acts that are committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against a civilian population,” Mr. Ellis said. “What you’re looking at is really a policy, in which the government or the authorities are planning the attack.”

“When you look at the concept of why and how the I.C.C. was created, I just don’t think this fits,” he said. “But the filing does something that’s important. It raises awareness. Ultimately the plaintiffs will elevate this in the public eye and it will force the court to respond.”

U.S.: A Dark Decade for Civil Rights and Liberties

Πηγή: The International News Magazine
By Kanya D'Almeida
Saturday, 10 September

WASHINGTON, Sep 9 (IPS) - The tenth anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center's Twin Towers and the Pentagon on Sep. 11, 2001 are marked by mourning.

With rallies planned across the country, largely concentrated at the sites of the twin tragedies in Washington D.C. and Lower Manhattan in New York City, victims' family members and politicians will gather on
Sunday to share a solemn moment for those who were killed and maimed on that fateful day.

But another group of mourners are making themselves heard this year, lamenting more than just civilian deaths.

Led by civil rights and advocacy organisations like the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) and the Brennan Center for Justice, this group is marking the demise of pre-9/11 democracy in the U.S., using the auspicious day to demand restoration of basic human and civil rights.

"We are using this moment to take a step back and ask big, broad questions about how and why the U.S. continues to define itself in a state of perpetual emergency, how we seem to be moving towards a national security state, rather than returning to a proper balance between liberty and security," Ben Wizner, litigation director of the ACLU's National Security Project and co-author of the union's newly-minted report ". Call to Courage", told IPS.

Wizner acknowledged that the U.S. has a long history of responding to national trauma by restricting rights and ladling out unchecked power to the executive during times of crisis - a pattern that is clearly marked out by the government's clampdown on individual rights and liberties during the Civil War, the Cold War and World War II, he said.

"But part of that pattern has always entailed realising our mistakes, admitting when we went too far, and attempting to regain some sort of balance in civil society," Wizner said, adding that in the decade since 9/11, the opposite has been true.

"The danger of defining a war as being against 'terrorism' is that it takes place everywhere and may last forever, the war itself becomes an abstraction rather than a reality, and there is no end in sight," he said.

"After the massive security response to 9/11, we all thought the pendulum would swing back, but it appears to be going in the same direction. Despite the fear-mongering, we haven't seen massive follow-up attacks in the U.S., the political debate is the same as it was 10 years ago, more and more power is being channeled to the
executive and to law enforcement and there has been increased authorization of illegal detentions without charge or trial and to the use of lethal force away from traditional battlefields," he concluded.

According to the CCR, the decade since 9/11 has been used to "shred the U.S. Constitution, trample on the Bill of Rights, discard the Geneva Conventions, and heap scorn on the domestic torture statute and the U.N. Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment."

Hauling President Barack Obama into the spotlight for failing to deliver on any of his 9/11-related promises, the CCR claimed that Obama "has failed to shut down Guantánamo and to hold the Bush administration accountable for its war crimes, including torture;
(has allowed) war in Afghanistan to rage on with no sign of termination; and has perpetuated the practice of rendition to third countries for interrogation and indefinite detention, when monitoring and 'diplomatic assurances' cannot prevent against torture."

To commemorate the anniversary, the CCR compiled a database of its own clients who have suffered from the climate of impunity and illegality that has reigned for 10 years, including testimony from Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen who was tortured for a full year in Syria; 17-year-old Mohammed Khan Tumani, one of the original 22 minors to be detained and severely abused in Guantanamo Bay; and Benamar Benatta, who spent a total of five years in detention and is currently a plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit against former attorney-general John Ashcroft.

Benatta's testimony reads, "(While) in detention, I was unaware of how far the horrors of 9/11 had changed our world. We have let fear and hatred get the best of us."

As security tightens around New York and Washington on the eve of the weekend anniversary, a pressing concern on the radar of countless civil rights advocates has been the impingement of the state surveillance apparatus onto personal privacy.

A recent report by the Associated Press that exposed the close working ties between the New York City Police Department (NYPD) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) drew attention to some of the
destructive effects of counterterrorism on local communities, particularly the CIA's practice of deploying "authentic" spies into local communities for information-gathering purposes.

According to the AP report's authors, "the NYPD [currently] operates far outside its borders and targets ethnic communities in ways that would run afoul of civil liberties rules if practiced by the federal government and it does so with unprecedented help from the CIA in a partnership that has blurred the bright line between foreign and domestic spying."

Faiza Patel, co-director of the Liberty and National Security Programme at the Brennan Center for Justice, wrote last week, "The privacy of our homes and our communications has been eroded by a range of new measures. These include secret 'sneak and peek' warrants that allow the government to search your home without telling you about it until months later and national security letters that compel banks and Internet service providers to secretly reveal your personal information."

Critics say that far from making the country safer, these programmes and policies have actually made the U.S. more vulnerable, both in its image overseas and, more importantly, on a domestic level. 

According to Heidi Beirich, research director of the Southern Poverty Law Center, the post-9/11 climate has seen a rise in hate groups across the country, possibly one of the most worrisome manifestations of a population's insecurity.

"There were no specific anti-Islamic hate groups before 9/11," Beirich told IPS.

"Now there are groups solely devoted to anti-Muslim hatred, including groups such as Pam Geller's 'Stop Islamization of America'," she added, referencing a group notorious for its Muslim-bashing that is
planning what will undoubtedly be a highly racially charged rally in New York this Sunday.