Civilians in War Zones and International Law

In a discussion on Civilians in War Zones, eminent Judge, Richard Goldstone, formerly of the Constitutional Court of South Africa, characterized the last century as “very bloody”. At the beginning of the 20th century, there was one civilian killed for every eight or nine soldiers. In World War II, the ratio became 1 to 1. Now, for every soldier killed, nine civilians die. The cause is the use of indiscriminate air power which pays propaganda value lip service to supposed minimization of collateral damage, a euphemism for civilian injuries, but also because of “deliberate attacks against civilians” to terrorize them.

Though we already have some excellent international court facilities, like The Hague in Holland, not all countries co-operate in making them effective, including the US, and so to deter this trend, Goldstone wants better international courts and more international co-operation to bring criminals to justice:

Our only hope is in an efficient, international system of justice&hellip [and] …an effective, coherent international system of law.

The widespread availability of pictorial evidence, from digital cameras, mobile phones and hand held movie cameras, easily transmitted from country to country by the internet offers new ways of bringing criminals to justice. He said:

There should be true equality. People’s human dignity and their right to that dignity needs to be recognized, [through] a concerted effort to implement international law.

Helen Stacy, a Stanford scholar in international and comparative law, pointed to the admirable role of the US in bringing about the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and in pressing on with the Nuremberg Trials. Yet the US has fallen short of its once impressive standards in refusing to sign, for example, the Convention on the Rights of the Child. 194 nations have ratified this convention including all of the nations in the UN except Somalia and the US! Equally, the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, has only not been signed by the US.

The US has, of course, liberal forms of expression, and so notionally it is possible for citizens to raise these issues and press for them, but It is pretty plain to outsiders, if not to many people within the US system, that the fault in the system is the press and broadcast media which are overwhelmingly owned by one small section of society with a view of the world that does not favor many of these conventions, for all the past reputation of the US. The media either fail to highlight important international issues, or make light of them. Professor James Campbell, who headed Brown University’s Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice, said:

Conversations like this are enormously important. The future of international humanitarian law is being determined.

International humanitarian law is “a constant struggle, an inescapably political struggle assailed by powerful enemies, and curiously mocked by a public that regards it as naïve, feckless, or who regard the idea of international law as an oxymoron”. Nevertheless, “the rapid expansion of international law is ongoing… Just as freedom is a constant struggle, so is international humanitarian law. It is being waged in our country, in dialogues like the one we’re having today”.

Ultimately, the skepticism about international law, will remain valid as long as the most powerful country in the deliberately stands in the way of effective implementation because it prefers to be its own law. That would be fine, if that country operated internationally by the legal and democratic principles which it is fond of citing. Instead it uses the double talk of John Foster Dulles—it always agrees in principle, while in practice putting every obstacle in the way.

Our Decline Begins with Glenn Beck

Kevin Kalmes (opednews.com) writes that the decline of a civilization begins with a breakdown in the most basic principles of a civilized society:

• morality
• spiritualism
• social mores
• rule of law
• moral philosophy
  
  • good v evil
  • virtue v vice
  • justice v lawlessness
  • truth v prevarication.

Sounds just right except for “spiritualism”, but I’ll take it to mean spirituality, and I can accept that when it means the oneness of things.

Kevin continues saying that the degradation of moral responsibility and the deterioration of moral character defines Glenn Beck. He embodies all that is wrong with a civilization that has lost its moral compass. The loss of a moral code allows the basest of human flaws to surface and spawn the antithesis of civilization. When Beck speaks of the antichrist, the beast God will destroy just before the final defeat of Satan, he is speaking of himself. And for the first time, he would be correct in his splenetic blasphemy!

The moral supervision of our Nation needs to first defeat antichrist Beck before we can recalibrate our moral compass and return to the moral code that Americans used to value.

That's all right on the nose, say I. Basically the man's one of a load of opportunistic self serving creeps, who haven't a Christian thought in their heads, and never have had. They are only qualified to speak evil, so that's what they do.

Massacre of the Innocents? Flaws in US Justice

In the USA, which boasts itself the model of all justice and fairness, Cornelius Dupree, 51, had spent 30 years in jail for rape and robbery when Texas District Judge, Don Adams, said he was “free to go”—cleared of his conviction by DNA evidence. Yet just 266 people have been exonerated by DNA evidence since 1989, according to the Innocence Project, which aims to reform the use of science in the criminal justice system. That most of them are black shows the continuing racial injustice of US justice!

Black men accused of raping white women are falsely convicted than than others accused of rape, and young suspects under 18 are at greater risk of false confession than others. Capital exonerations are less common among those convicted of murdering more than two victims and those convicted of murdering children. When defendants would not confess, and vigorously asserted their innocence at trial, yet were found guilty, the rate of later exoneration is higher.

Attorney Barry Scheck, who heads the Innocence Project, said:

Cornelius Dupree spent the prime of his life behind bars because of mistaken identification that probably would have been avoided if the best practices now used in Dallas had been employed.

Critics say the US criminal justice system is riddled with injustice through bad practices and outdated science, even though modern science and technology can prevent it. The police identification lineup is grossly flawed, and has been known to be for a long time. 75 percent of all convictions proved wrong by DNA evidence start with mistaken identity by eyewitnesses. In 1979, Cornelius Dupree was himself picked out of a photo display by a rape victim. She picked the wrong man!

Brandon Garrett, a professor at the University of Virginia School of Law, points out that people are not as certain of details as they think, and are subject to all sorts of subtle suggestions by police, even subconscious and inadvertant ones, but also, when they want to nail a victim, deliberate ones. Garrett added:

There have now been thousands of studies with incredibly consistent results all showing that suggestion has this outsized powerful effect on eyewitness memory… Even if police are trying their best not to signal anything, the eyewitness—who may be a victim of a crime and hesitant about participating—may be looking to the police officer for reassurance and for cues and may perceive things that weren’t even intended.

The big question, in a country where tens of thousands of cases each year rely on eyewitness testimony for convictions, is “do the administrators of this ‘justice’ want to change their bad but often convenient practices?”. Some, but only a few, do. Some police departments, perhaps a few hundred, have begun to change the way they conduct lineups. One way is to have an officer not involved in the case supervising the parade. Another is to tell the witness that the suspect may not be in the lineup at all.

The same criticisms hold true for other old fashioned police methods that remain in practice even though modern day science has disproved their reliability. Michael Saks, law professor at Arizona State University, calls the pseudo science still used by the police departments “wannabe science”. It includes handwriting, fingerprints, fire and arson investigation, and even forensic dentistry.

Cameron Todd Willingham was executed in 2004 for setting the house blaze that killed his three small daughters. Attorney Scheck and other legal experts engaged several fire science experts to review the evidence that convicted Willingham. They concluded the fire was not arson. University of Michigan professor Samuel Gross, said:

The problem with arson cases is that if the defendant wasn’t guilty it is not because someone else did it, it is because there was no crime!

Much US justice, especially in emotion loaded cases, is concerned with having a victim, not catching the real criminal. People want to feel exonerated that someone, anyone, has been punished for what they think is a heinous crime. A conviction will convince them the punishment is just, though they have no idea of the strength of the evidence presented.

That is so in the Lockerbie case, the destruction of an airliner for which Abdul Baset Almagrahi was convicted. The case against him is extremely thin, and looks to have been bought because it suited the US authorities to pin the outrage on to Libya. The conviction does not look just, and unless justice is seen to be done, no one should pretend it is just. Gail Jaspen, chief deputy director of Virginia Department of Forensics, says:

Evidence by itself doesn’t prove somebody’s innocence, because the (forensic science) department doesn’t have the ability to exonerate anybody. Only the court or the governor does.

So however strong the evidence, scientific or otherwise, it may not be enough, when the legal authorities, police, judges, governors, and even presidents, in international cases, already have made up their mind which outcome they favor.

The irreversibility of a death sentence, when evidence is found that undermines a death penalty, is a big argument for its abolition in civilized societies. To keep a man imprisoned wrongfully for thirty years is bad, but the man still has his life, and the state can offer some compensation for wrongful imprisonment. Bringing a dead man back to life remains impossible. Yet, the senior authorities of most states in the Union will not consider abolishing the death penalty, confident as they are it will never be used against them.