Posted on 09/20/2001 10:54:27 PM PDT by lewislynn
Bringing terrorists to justice is almost impossible without an international criminal court, says Richard Ackland.
We will not rest until these terrorists are brought to justice. We will hunt them down." That was the former US secretary of state Warren Christopher sounding off on June 26, 1996. A bomb had just killed 19 US Air Force personnel and wounded 370 other Americans at the Khobar Towers apartments in Saudi Arabia. The Americans were there trying to enforce sanctions against neighbouring Iraq.
The following year the next secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, announced at a meeting of the Group of Eight in Denver that a 40-point plan had been put in place, and that "terrorists would have no place to hide".
It seems that for as long as one can remember the US has been making braggadocio claims about "hunting evil down" or "smoking them out and bringing them to justice". Yet it is clear that so much of it is posturing. The legal remedies are as ineffective as the military ones.
Bringing Osama bin Laden "to justice" is akin to the military getting bushed in the khaki mountains of Afghanistan.
The Khobar bombing took place more than five years ago. In June this year the FBI announced that 14 defendants had been indicted over the attack. The Legal Times in the US says the case, the US v al-Mughassil, stands as a monument to the difficulty of bringing terrorists to justice.
None of the accused is in the US. Eleven are in Saudi custody, and the rest are fugitives. There is no extradition treaty between the US and Saudi Arabia, and under Saudi law US investigators cannot even question those indicted. The Saudis have also said they are most unhappy at the thought of leaving its citizens to the "mercy of the US criminal justice system".
The Legal Times said this week that one of the accused, Hani al-Sayegh, even entered US custody en route from Canada to Saudi Arabia. Negotiations for a plea agreement fell apart, and the US authorities ended up handing him over to the Saudi authorities in October 1999.
Bin Laden is already under indictment in the US for the bombing of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. Another 20 have been indicted for those crimes, and only four have been tried and convicted; others are awaiting trial in New York or are fighting extradition from Britain.
The Republican senator Arlen Specter was last week in an impatient mood at a Judiciary Committee meeting, asking: "What has the Department of Justice done to try and serve the warrants and take Osama bin Laden into custody?"
Altogether the guys from the department have been far too reticent in searching the caves around the Afghan hills so they can serve some documents on bin Laden. Not that retrieving suspects from Afghanistan is altogether impossible. According to US reports, Mir Amar Kasi, a Pakistani, was retrieved from Afghanistan and convicted in Virginia of the 1993 murder of two CIA operatives.
But finding impartial juries in the US for Islamic terrorists would be just about impossible, particularly as the accused are sworn to kill Americans anywhere in the world. William Barr, attorney-general under President George Bush snr, hit the nail on the head when he said the criminal justice system in terrorist situations was next to useless.
The quaint thing is that the US position is not helped by its attitude to the Rome Statute, which proposes a permanent international criminal court.
For the court to be set up, 60 countries need to ratify the statute. There are now 139 signatories, but so far only 38 ratifications. The US has not ratified the statute because it is concerned that at some future date its military, or even political leaders, could be hauled before it and charged with crimes against humanity. Australia's Attorney-General, Daryl Williams, last month spoke in favour of the court being set up.
The former Yugoslavian president Slobodan Milosevic is before a special ad hoc criminal court in The Hague that was created by the Security Council of the UN. It is not a permanent instrument of justice. The interesting compromise in the Lockerbie bombing case was that the accused were tried in The Netherlands by a court composed of Scottish judges.
Anyway, countries say they will not hand over terrorists to the US because they would not get a fair trial. That excuse would not hold water if the international criminal court existed. There would then be an independent body that could try those indicted over acts of terrorism. The court's prospects would be enhanced if the US ratified the Rome Statute.
Of course, there is still the option of bombing various nations to pieces under the dead-or-alive rules, or, as the US military codenames it in a weirdly Islamic turn of phrase, Operation Infinite Justice.
justinian@lawpress.com.au
The Israelis have a much better solution: hunt down the terrorists, and kill them on the spot.
See also:
Justice in war does not necessarily come in front of a temporal judge.
Bingo. This is not a matter for tortured legalism.
Justice = root him out and empty a clip.
This is war.
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