War Crimes

GUANTANAMO BAY, Cuba -- Amid days of secret Pentagon proceedings against those suspected of being al-Qaida terrorists, the U.S. military is reopening its war-crimes court today with a single charge against an alleged war-on-terror foot soldier with no explicit links to the Sept. 11 attacks. Australian David Hicks, 31, is slated this afternoon to become the first Guantanamo captive to appear before a newly constituted Military Commission. In a nine-page charge sheet, he is accused of providing material support for terrorism.

UNITED NATIONS -- A high-level U.N. mission to Darfur said yesterday that the Sudanese government had orchestrated human rights crimes against its own people and urged that leaders of Sudan's government and militias be charged with war crimes. But Khartoum is blocking United Nations attempts to stem the violence, organizing opposition to the mission's report and stepping back from its agreement to accept a joint U.N.-African peacekeeping force in the region. Sudan's government "has manifestly failed to protect the population of Darfur from large-scale international crimes, and has itself orchestrated and participated in these crimes," according to a report commissioned by the U.N. Human Rights Council.

WASHINGTON -- A small group of Marylanders staged an antiwar protest in the Capitol Hill office of Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski yesterday to demand that she stop voting to fund the war in Iraq. Mikulski, who voted against giving President Bush authority to use military force in Iraq in 2002 but has voted subsequently to approve spending on the war, did not meet with the protesters. Through an aide, the Maryland Democrat declined to comment on the protest. "We know that Senator Mikulski is against the war, but she has voted to fund it," said Susan Crane, a peace activist from Baltimore.

My smart and ambitious Serbian language teacher in Belgrade last summer spoke for an entire generation of young people in the former Yugoslavia when she unleashed a bitter tirade on the difficulties of obtaining a visa to travel abroad, even to nearby Austria or Italy. "I feel like I'm in a prison," Marija complained, "and I don't even know who to blame!" Not all of Marija's friends are so unsure. Many, she told me, feel the European Union is blackmailing Serbs by requiring their government to arrest Bosnian Serb army chief Ratko Mladic - indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal of the Former Yugoslavia on charges of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity - before restarting its "stabilization and association agreement" with Belgrade.

Sept. 30 1946 An international military tribunal in Nuremberg, Germany, found 22 top Nazi leaders guilty of war crimes.

WASHINGTON -- When the Muslim world was first inflamed over images of abuse from the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, President Bush took the lead in a campaign to minimize the damage by pledging that his government would speak through its actions. "There will be investigations. People will be brought to justice," Bush said May 5, 2004, speaking from the White House and into the lens of a camera for Al-Hurra, a U.S.-sponsored Arabic-language satellite network. But 28 months later, provisions in Bush's proposed legislation for detainee interrogations and terrorism tribunals could hamper potential criminal prosecutions in some of the 17 abuse investigations from Iraq and Afghanistan pending before federal prosecutors in Virginia by retroactively changing a key law. The CIA's former assistant general counsel, a defense attorney for a veteran intelligence officer under scrutiny and outside military-law experts all said Bush's proposal could make it more difficult to obtain indictments by retroactively weakening the U.S. law against war crimes.

JERUSALEM -- In a report released yesterday, Amnesty International accused Israel of committing war crimes during its recent campaign against Hezbollah in Lebanon, saying it broke international law by deliberately causing extensive destruction to the country's infrastructure. "Many of the violations examined in this report are war crimes that give rise to individual criminal responsibility," the human rights group said. "They include directly attacking civilian objects and carrying out indiscriminate or disproportionate attacks.

SAMOOD , Iraq -- Rumors of war rumbled across Kurdistan's grassy hilltops. Legions of Saddam Hussein's troops were coming in tanks, trucks and airplanes to crush the Kurds' long-festering uprising. Filled with dread, Shazada Saeed and her family prepared to do what Kurds had always done to escape the brutality of their mightier Arab, Turkish and Persian neighbors. Once the bombing started, they scrambled into the crevices and caves of the snowy peaks that had long sheltered them. "The artillery shelling was so heavy we had to run," said Saeed, who now lives in this small Kurdish town.

WASHINGTON -- Five months after the end of World War II, the U.S. Supreme Court, in a 6-2 decision, upheld the death sentence of a Japanese general who had commanded the final defense of the Philippine Islands. The court's action greatly troubled a young Navy veteran, John Stevens, who a year later became a law clerk for one of the two justices who dissented in the case. The "great divide between our enemies and ourselves," Justice Wiley B. Rutledge wrote in his 1946 dissent, is that theirs is ruled by "unbridled power" and "ours is one of universal law" - for friends and foes alike.

Here is how defense attorney George Latimer put it at the court-martial: "These are the experiences just before they go in: a number of reconnaissance and sweep and destroy missions, without ever seeing an enemy; losses of buddies by mines and snipers; never any security from death for it always came from unseen and unknown sources. ... You never knew when your number was up, and you never knew when the next step might cost you a leg or your life. ... Women and children operating with your enemy, being used to help destroy your unit.