Miami Torture Trial Will Spotlight U.S. Abuses Abroad
Tue Feb 06, 2007 at 04:46:44 AM PDT
A federal trial in Miami, Fla., will point a great big finger at U.S. abuses in Iraq, Guantanamo and secret CIA prisons abroad.
Reporter Carrie Weimar at the St. Petersburg Times has a fascinating story today:
the boy from Orlando... known as Charles "Chuckie" Taylor Jr., son of Charles Taylor, the former president of Liberia and one of Africa's most feared warlords...sits in a Miami detention center awaiting trial. He will be the first person prosecuted under a 1994 law that makes it illegal for a U.S. citizen to commit acts of torture abroad. If convicted, he could face more than 60 years in prison.
"Chuckie" got busted when he was 13 for auto theft. Three years later he was charged with aggravated assault, retail theft and grand larceny. The next year, he got serious:
...sheriff's deputies said he and two friends tried to rob a young man on a west Orlando street. When confronted by the victim's father, Emmanuel pulled out a .38-caliber handgun and pointed it at his head, according to a sheriff's report.
A psychiatric evaluation performed at the time said Emmanuel had anger management problems.
So they sent him to Liberia to live with his biological dad. That would be Charles Taylor.
Taylor's National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL) launched a 'revolution' disintegrated into a seven-party civil war, only slightly more complicated than the one in Iraq. The prize? Liberia's iron ore, diamond trade, timber, and rubber. The Wikipedia entry reports:
up to 200,000 people were killed, and more than 1 million were forced from their homes.
"Chuckie" was head of Taylor's security unit, according to Weimar at the St. Pete Times.
"His unit did things like beating people to death, burying them alive, rape - the most horrible kind of war crimes," said Elise Keppler, counsel for Human Rights Watch's International Justice Program.
Now, Chuckie might help establish some concrete definitions of torture. Hofstra law professor Julian Ku thinks the trial might:
...create a standard that could be applied to U.S. agents who interrogate prisoners in foreign countries.
"Before, no one really knew what torture meant under the 1994 law," Ku said. "Now, there will be a better definition and that could pose a problem for the administration."
Specifically, Chuckie is charged with being party to:
[they] pressed a hot iron into the man's flesh, shocked him with electrodes, rubbed salt into his wounds and forced him at gunpoint to hold scalding water in his hands.
Not exactly the chipper-shredder porno talk shows froth about whenever American abuses are raised, but some of the U.S. abuses reported were substantially more aggressive — even murderous.
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