4-19-09, 11:11 am

Original source: CubaNews In a report presented last February in Geneva by former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson, the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ) called upon President Barack Obama to put an end to the violations of human rights that have been a part of United States policy since the September 11, 2001 attacks.

The Commission asked Obama not only to overturn this policy but also to investigate those responsible for having carried it out. The report was prepared by a panel of prestigious international jurists who spent three years traveling to all regions of the world holding hearings that revealed that the planet had made a terrible return to the past with regard to respecting international law and human rights. It stated that “if we do not act now, we run the risk that the damages inflicted on international law could become permanent.”

The panel’s conclusions paint a picture of the scope of the terror carried out by the world’s number one power, which then spread to numerous other countries around the world who took advantage of the prevailing climate to settle their own accounts, according to a piece published by Página/12 in Argentina by journalist Eduardo Febbro, which was based on an interview with Federico Andreu Guzmán, general counsel of the ICJ.

Andreu Guzmán points out that the report “calls upon the new US administration to revise the entire policy that was adopted after September 11, 2001 through the Patriot Act....For example: the practice of keeping people in prison completely incommunicado and for indefinite periods violates basic precepts of international law, human rights, and international humanitarian law. The gains that have been made since passage of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights have been set back;...the well-known practice of extraordinary renditions [wherein terrorism suspects are sent to countries other than the United States to be held and interrogated], are a form of international kidnapping. Therefore the time has come to put an end to this.”

When the journalist compared the US forms of carrying out kidnappings, indiscriminate arrests, tortures, clandestine movements, and detentions without charges with what took place in Argentina at the Navy Mechanical School (ESMA), Andreu Guzmán notes: “If you look back at the report on Argentina issued by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in 1987, you see that a lot of what was done then during the antiterrorist struggle looks very familiar. Operation Cóndor is very similar to the policy of extraordinary renditions implemented by the United States. In Operation Cóndor people were kidnapped in one country and then surfaced in another country. There are many similarities with the old authoritarian methods of confronting real or supposed problems.

“And you need to remember that right after the terrible events of September 11, the Security Council of the UN adopted Resolution 1371, which called on all member states of the UN to fight terrorism. This resolution allowed immense discretion about how to do that, without any reminder of the obligations regarding human rights, international humanitarian law, or the rights of refugees.... The fact is that there is no single war against terrorism. There are acts of terror in certain countries. When they take place in times of peace they can be dealt with through police operations. And when they take place in times of war, they can be dealt with using the standards laid out by international humanitarian law.”

The ICJ’s report calls upon President Obama to address the abuses of the antiterrorist struggle and to carry out a “far-reaching and transparent” investigation. In this regard, Abreu Guzmán points out: “In the course of this so-called war against terrorism many abuses have been committed.... Knowing that all this was not a result of individual decisions but rather a state policy, you would have to ask if this does not fall under the definition of crimes against humanity. Torture was widely practiced, as were arbitrary detentions for indefinite periods. We believe that not only is it now time to eliminate these measures, but also to investigate those responsible for planning and carrying out these measures.”

Although the worldwide corporate media may try to hide it, there is an obvious and unhappy similarity between the abuses committed by the US occupation forces against its prisoners in Iraq and the outrages committed some years ago against revolutionaries and those suspected of being revolutionaries who were held in the jails of the military tyrannies of Latin America, with US military experts as advisors...but who still are waiting for justice.

--A CubaNews translation by Will Reissner. Edited by Walter Lippmann.