US a Haven for War Criminals
More than 1,000 people from 85 countries who are accused of such crimes as rape, killings, torture and genocide are living in the United States, according to Department of Homeland Security figures.
America has become a haven for the world's war criminals because it lacks the laws needed to prosecute them, Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., said Wednesday. There's been only one U.S. indictment of someone suspected of a serious human-rights abuse. Durbin said torture was the only serious human-rights violation that was a crime under American law when committed outside the United States by a non-American national.
Torture committed by American nationals, on the other hand, is not really torture, and is necessary for national security, and is not really under American jurisdiction when carried out on military bases in other countries.
David Scheffer is a Northwestern University law professor who was the ambassador at large for war-crimes issues during the Clinton administration. He testified that after the experience of war-crimes tribunals after World War II and international tribunals prosecuting many atrocities over the past 15 years, "one would be forgiven to assume that surely in the United States the law is now well established to enable U.S. courts — criminal and military — to investigate and prosecute the full range of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. . . .
"That, however, is not the case."
Of course, if it was, guys like Rumsfeld would be in even more trouble than they are already, and Bush would need an auto-scriber to handle the number of pardons he’d have to issue.
Snarky comments about the current administration aside, this is really an institutional problem that far predates them, but it is another sign of how ignoring the principles that the US was once thought to be the ultimate example of, has made what were once thought to be unfortunate exceptions into standard fare.
