As we learned Monday, the U.S. Department of Justice wants Charles Emmanuel to go down hard for torture he ordered and supervised when he was part of a Liberian paramilitary organization called the Demon Forces. He commanded the unit when his father, Charles Taylor, reigned brutally over that west African nation. Taylor's forces dragged children into battle and made hacking off of limbs their signature. Since June 2007, he has been on trial at The Hague under the jurisdiction of the Special Court for Sierra Leone. The indictment includes 11 counts of war crimes, crimes against humanity and other serious violations of international humanitarian law. A verdict is expected in 2009.
Emmanuel, a U.S. citizen born in Boston, was convicted in a Miami federal court on several counts. His victims were tortured with electric shocks, molten plastic, lit cigarettes, hot clothes irons, bayonets and ants. Prosecutors are seeking a 147-year prison term.
The Emmanuel conviction was surely a milestone, as Elise Keppler, senior counsel for the International Justice Program at Human Rights Watch, told The New York Times two months ago. But it's amazing so many people are unable to extrapolate from Emmanuel's crimes to the crimes of others.
As the inimitable Glenn Greenwald writes today:
Acts which, when ordered by Liberians, are "criminal torture" meriting life imprisonment magically become, when ordered by Americans, mere "aggressive interrogation techniques." And while not all of the "techniques" used by the Liberians were authorized by Bush officials ("hot clothes irons" and "biting ants shoveled onto people's bodies"), many of the authorized American techniques are classic torture tactics and resulted in the deaths of many detainees and the total insanity of many more.
Worse, AP -- with canine-like subservience -- mindlessly recites the Bush administration's excuses (Abu Ghraib was due to low-level rogue bad apples and "there has been no systematic mistreatment of detainees") without even mentioning the ample evidence proving how false those government claims are. That's standard American "journalism" for you: "Our Government says X, and even if it's false and even if it's intensely disputed, we'll just leave it at that." Doing anything more -- as NBC News' David Gregory pointed out -- is "not their role."
There's something beautifully illustrative about this torture prosecution. Apparently, it's not just appropriate, but necessary and urgent, for American courts to be used to prosecute the leaders of small African nations who order torture exclusively in their own land. Doing that is necessary to uphold what the Bush DOJ calls "respect for and trust in authority, government and a rule of law."
But -- say Bush loyalists and our pliant political class in unison -- the one thing that we cannot tolerate is for American courts to be used to impose accountability on American leaders who authorized illegal torture. And, of course, the only thing worse than doing that would be to subject them to prosecution by another country or, creepier still, an international tribunal. That would be an intolerable infringement of our sovereignty, we say as we prosecute the son of Liberia's President for acts he undertook exclusively inside Liberia.
Prosecution of Americans for ordering or implementing torture, as pundits like Ruth Marcus and legal theorists like Cass Sunstein have argued, should be avoided by the new administration. Move on, don't get diverted, don't be "vindictive," they and others say.
Contrary voices are being heard with ever more frequency, however. Syracuse University Law Prof. David Crane, the former chief prosecutor of the UN-backed Special Court for Sierra Leone said today that President Barack Obama "will face a number of rule-of-law challenges" when he takes office next month:
"In his campaign, he certainly has laid down a marker that we will return to the rule of law and respect the rule of law. And...his administration certainly will follow that up. We’ve see grumblings related to Guantanamo ... and its possible closing. We see considerations as to what’s going on in the various tension centers in Iraq and Afghanistan. And I think that with his approach of reaching out, I think that we’re going to see...an attempt to move forward with respect to the rule of law," he says.
But he says it won’t be easy. "It’s going to be a real challenge because of the fact that the rest of the world has looked at the United States through a prism based on the alleged problems that President Bush and Vice-President Cheney have had with the rule of law," he says.
Publicly repudiating torture under any circumstances would be one step toward building worldwide respect for the United States. But another step is required to make us whole: targeted prosecutions of a few of those at the highest levels who ordered torture. Without that, Charles Emmanuel's prosecution can only be viewed as the most profound hypocrisy.