China’s police-state

Saturday, July 18th, 2009

John Chan |

The Chinese regime’s ongoing police-military suppression of unrest in the north-western province of Xinjiang has created international tensions. While the US and other Western powers have largely remained silent, concerned that social and political instability in China could endanger the global economy, Turkey has stepped up its condemnations of China while Islamic extremists have threatened to attack Chinese interests overseas.

 

Beijing’s deployment of more than 20,000 heavily-armed troops to Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, may have resulted in the deaths of hundreds of members of the Uighur minority. So far the official death toll is 192 (mostly Han civilians killed by Uighur rioters), with 1,721 wounded, and 331 shops and 627 vehicles burned. More than 1,400 people have been arrested.

 

The response of the security forces to any sign of resistance has been ruthless, in order to intimidate any opposition, especially from the working class. On Monday, soldiers shot and killed two Uighurs and wounded a third. While the Chinese authorities claimed that the shooting was necessary to prevent a crime, Zhang Ming, a construction worker at a nearby building site told the Associated Press (AP) that he saw three men with knives and sticks attack a group of paramilitary police officers, who then chased them, beat and shot them.

 

AP reported: “Photos show one policemen raising his rifle to strike a man. Lying at their feet, the man, who was wearing a blue shirt, had blood on his right leg. Police quickly formed a ring around him and raised their guns skyward towards surrounding buildings as if worried about retaliation. An armoured personnel carrier and paramilitary police arrived, and police waved their guns and shouted for people to get off the streets.”

 

Yesterday, the local chief prosecutor Hamsi Mamuti declared that new arrest warrants would soon be issued and threatened to “severely punish” the so-called violent elements involved in the protests. This threat of a new wave of arrests, which came after Xinjiang Communist Party secretary Wang Lequan had declared that most suspects had been arrested already, has created a tense atmosphere.

 

According to the AP report: “The fear of arrest was almost palpable in Uighur neighbourhoods, unlike last week when many agitated residents were eager to talk to foreign journalists… Small groups of paramilitary police gripping assault rifles with bayonets stood on special platforms on busy street corners and sidewalks Thursday in Uighur neighborhoods. They used metal barricades with spikes to block the main road into the biggest Uighur district of Er Dao Qiao.”

 

Foreign reporters have to wear photo identity cards and are not allowed to photograph the thousands of troops guarding the city. The Internet has not been restored since it was cut during the initial July 5 riots and journalists can still only file reports from the government-run media centre.

 

Far from resolving the ethnic and social tensions in Xinjiang, Beijing’s heavy-handed methods can only deepen the alienation among the oppressed minorities.

 

The virtual collective silence of the major Western powers indicates that they approve China’s police-state measures, despite small protests by Uighur groups outside Chinese embassies in Europe, North America and Australia.

 

Responding to the killing of two Uighurs on Monday, the US State Department spokesman Ian Kelly merely said: “As they [the Chinese authorities] work to restore order, we believe that it’s important that they respect the legal rights of all Chinese citizens.”

 

Beijing criticised Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Tuesday over his comment last week that the Chinese repression was “like genocide”. He even threatened to take China to the UN Security Council over the issue.

 

Erdogan’s remarks inflamed a wave of anti-Chinese protests on the basis of pan-Turkic nationalism, which views Xinjiang or East Turkestan as an ancestral homeland for the Turks for over 1,500 years. In Istanbul on July 12, about 5,000 people turned out, holding Turkish flags and the flags of the short-lived East Turkestan republic that broke away from China in the 1930s. They called for a boycott of Chinese-made goods, a proposal made by Turkish industry and trade minister Nihat Ergun last week.

 

Turkey is an important base for exiled Uighur activists. The ideological components of pan-Turkic nationalism reflect the ambitions of the Turkish bourgeoisie to expand its political and economic influence in Central Asia and the Caucasus, especially in the Turkic-speaking states like Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and Kyrgyzstan that were established after the collapse of Soviet Union in 1991.

 

While the Chinese government had not formally protested against Turkey, the state-controlled media has invoked Turkey’s own record of ruthlessly suppressing Kurdish separatist movements, including its military incursion into northern Iraq in 2007.

 

China Daily on Tuesday demanded that Erdogan withdraw his genocide remarks as “irresponsible and groundless”. The People’s Daily on July 14 reported that patriotic Internet users, a layer of middle-class nationalists cultivated by the Chinese regime, “feel insulted by Turkish actions and suggested that China should change its attitude towards the Kurdish Workers Party and support their appeal for independence, so as to make Turkey pay a heavy political price”.

 

The state media’s accusations of “biased and twisted” reporting by Western journalists has also mobilised Chinese patriotic “angry youth” for xenophobic attacks. The web site of the Turkish embassy in China was hacked earlier this week to post a letter warning Turkey not to interfere with China’s internal affairs.

 

The Turkish-based English daily, Hurriyet, warned on July 10 that Ankara’s support for Uighur nationalists would offend not only China, but its ally, Russia, which shares Beijing’s interests in suppressing separatist insurgencies in Central Asia. “If Turkey were to go beyond calls to respect human rights in the region, and appear to be supporting Uighur separatism, it is clear that this will rebound with China referring to the Kurdish issue and minority rights in this country,” the Hurriyet noted.

 

The Turkish foreign ministry issued a statement stressing its respect for China’s territorial integrity and denying any intention of interfering in Beijing’s internal affairs. “We expect China to provide the necessary environment of peace and security for Uighurs who constitute a bridge of friendship between China and Turkey,” it said.

 

Turkey is not in a position to challenge Russian and Chinese influence in the region. Russia and the four Central Asian member states of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) have publicly supported China’s actions in Xinjiang. Beijing also secured support from the two largest predominantly Muslim countries in Asia—Pakistan and Indonesia—which described its conduct as an “internal affair”.

 

 

The most reactionary response came from Algerian-based Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), which called for attacks on the 50,000 Chinese workers in the country and Chinese personnel across northwest Africa. Three weeks ago, the group ambushed a convoy of Algerian security forces protecting Chinese engineers, killing 24 Algerians.

 

 

AQIM’s statement has been exploited by the Chinese regime to justify its claims that the Xinjiang protests were instigated by “three forces”—extremism, terrorism and separatism—from abroad. The state-run media has been saturated with reports linking the term “terror” to exiled leaders like Rebiya Kadeer in order to justify Beijing’s heavy-handed measures.

 

While groups like the US Congress-financed World Uighur Congress headed by Rebiya could be instigating protests as a means of pressuring Beijing for concessions, the protests are an expression of pent-up anger over ethnic discrimination, and above all, the deepening social inequality created by the intensifying capitalist exploitation in Xinjiang and other parts of China.

 

According to a Financial Times article on July 10, the income gap between the Uighur rural poor and Han urban residents in Xinjiang widened from 2.1 times in 1980 to 3.24 times in 2007. Southern Xinjiang, where more than 90 percent are Uighurs, is falling even further behind. The average income gap between the richest northern county and the poorest in the south was 6.28 times in 2005. It is obvious that Beijing’s push for oil and gas in Xinjiang and Central Asia has had little benefit for the Uighur masses, only a tiny Uighur elite connected with the Chinese Communist Party regime.

 

The Financial Times noted: “Xinjiang’s Blue Book, the government document measuring social and economic progress, warns that social problems give rise to a ‘severe threat’ of separatism and religious radicalism. The Communist party’s response is to speed up the attempt to transform Xinjiang into something more like the rest of China”. That means extending the cheap labour supply for employers in the industrially developed provinces.

 

The Xinhua news agency reported on July 15 that Xinjiang had exported 1.87 million “surplus agricultural labourers” in 2008—many of them poor nomads and farmers-turned workers in the busy assembly lines of the Pearl River Delta in Guangdong province. A local manager at Huizhou told the agency that compared to other migrants, Xinjiang workers were “more hardworking and durable, with strong working discipline, very responsible and very stable”.

 

The Chinese authorities are forcing poor minorities to work as cheap labour for ruthless sweatshop owners. According to the New York Times yesterday, Uighur poor in and around the city of Kashgar were told to join the exodus to the east or face a penalty of up to six months’ income. Abdul, whose 18-year-old sister is being recruited for a factory in Guangzhou, explained: “If asked, most people will go, because no one can afford the penalty.”

 

At the Hong Kong-owned Early Light Toy Factory in Shaoguang, the introduction of 800 Uighur workers, amid rising local unemployment, led to a brawl in which two Uighurs were bashed to death last month. It was this incident that directly ignited the protests in Urumqi, thousands of kilometres away.

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Israeli hires Internet soldiers

Saturday, July 18th, 2009

Straight out of Avigdor Lieberman’s Foreign Ministry: a new Internet Fighting Team! Israeli students and demobilized soldiers get paid to pretend they are just regular folks and leave pro-Israel comments on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other sites. The effort is meant to fight the “well-oiled machine” of “pro-Palestinian websites, with huge budgets… with content from the Hamas news agency.” The approach was test-marketed during Israel’s assault on Gaza, and by groups like Give Israel Your United Support, a controversial effort to use instant-access technology to crowd-source Israel advocates to fill in flash polls or vote up key articles on social networking sites.

Will the responders who are hired for this also present themselves as “ordinary net-surfers”?

“Of course,” says Shturman. “Our people will not say: ‘Hello, I am from the policy-explanation department of the Israeli Foreign Ministry and I want to tell you the following.’ Nor will they necessarily identify themselves as Israelis. They will speak as net-surfers and as citizens, and will write responses that will look personal but will be based on a prepared list of messages that the Foreign Ministry developed.”

The full article, translated by Occupation Magazine into English here:

The Foreign Ministry presents: talkbackers in the service of the State
By: Dora Kishinevski
Calcalist 5 July 2009

Translated for Occupation Magazine by George Malent

After they became an inseparable part of the service provided by public-relations companies and advertising agencies, paid Internet talkbackers are being mobilized in the service in the service of the State. The Foreign Ministry is in the process of setting up a team of students and demobilized soldiers who will work around the clock writing pro-Israeli responses on Internet websites all over the world, and on services like Facebook, Twitter and Youtube. The Foreign Ministry’s department for the explanation of Israeli policy* is running the project, and it will be an integral part of it. The project is described in the government budget for 2009 as the “Internet fighting team” – a name that was given to it in order to distinguish it from the existing policy-explanation team, among other reasons, so that it can receive a separate budget. Even though the budget’s size has not yet been disclosed to the public, sources in the Foreign Ministry have told Calcalist that in will be about NIS 600.000 in its first year, and it will be increased in the future. From the primary budget, about NIS 200.000 will be invested in round-the-clock activity at the micro-blogging website Twitter, which was recently featured in the headlines for the services it provided to demonstrators during the recent disturbances in Iran.

 

“To all intents and purposes the Internet is a theatre in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and we must be active in that theatre, otherwise we will lose,” Elan Shturman, deputy director of the policy-explanation department in the Foreign Ministry, and who is directly responsible for setting up the project, says in an interview with Calcalist. “Our policy-explanation achievements on the Internet today are impressive in comparison to the resources that have been invested so far, but the other side is also investing resources on the Internet. There is an endless array of pro-Palestinian websites, with huge budgets, rich with information and video clips that everyone can download and post on their websites. They are flooding the Internet with content from the Hamas news agency. It is a well-oiled machine. Our objective is to penetrate into the world in which these discussions are taking place, where reports and videos are published – the blogs, the social networks, the news websites of all sizes. We will introduce a pro-Israeli voice into those places. What is now going on in Iran is the proof of the need for such an operational branch,” adds Shturman. “It’s not like a group of friends is going to bring down the government with Twitter messages, but it does help to expand the struggle to vast dimensions.”

The missions: “monitoring” and “fostering discussions”

The Foreign Ministry intends to recruit youths who speak at least one foreign language and who are studying communications, political science or law, or alternatively those whose military background is in units that deal with information analysis. “It is a youthful language”, explains Shturman. “Older people do not know how to write blogs, how to act there, what the accepted norms are. The basic conditions are a high capacity for expression in English – we also have French- and Swedish-speakers – and familiarity with the online milieu. We are looking for people who are already writing blogs and circulating in Facebook”.

Members of the new unit will work at the Ministry (“They will punch a time card,” says Shturman) and enjoy the full technical support of Tahila, the government’s ISP, which is responsible for computer infrastructure and Internet services for government departments. “Their missions will be defined along the lines of the government policies that they will be required to defend on the Internet. It could be the situation in Gaza, the situation in the north or whatever is decided. We will determine which international audiences we want to reach through the Internet and the strategy we will use to reach them, and the workers will implement that on in the field. Of course they will not distribute official communiquיs; they will draft the conversations themselves. We will also activate an Internet-monitoring team – people who will follow blogs, the BBC website, the Arabic websites.”

According to Shturman the project will begin with a limited budget, but he has plans to expand the team and its missions: “the new centre will also be able to support Israel as an economic and commercial entity,” he says. “Alternative energy, for example, now interests the American public and Congress much more than the conflict in the Middle East. If through my team I can post in blogs dealing with alternative energy and push the names of Israeli companies there, I will strengthen Israel’s image as a developed state that contributes to the quality of the environment and to humanity, and along with that I may also manage to help an Israeli company get millions of dollars worth of contracts. The economic potential here is great, but for that we will require a large number of people. What is unique about the Internet is the fragmentation into different communities, every community deals with what interests it. To each of those communities you have to introduce material that is relevant to it.”

The inspiration: covert advertising on the Internet

The Foreign Ministry admits that the inspiration comes from none other than the much-reviled field of compensated commercial talkback: employees of companies and public-relations firms who post words of praise on the Internet for those who sent them there – the company that is their employer or their client. The professional responders normally identify themselves as chance readers of the article they are responding to or as “satisfied customers” of the company they are praising.

Will the responders who are hired for this also present themselves as “ordinary net-surfers”?

“Of course,” says Shturman. “Our people will not say: ‘Hello, I am from the policy-explanation department of the Israeli Foreign Ministry and I want to tell you the following.’ Nor will they necessarily identify themselves as Israelis. They will speak as net-surfers and as citizens, and will write responses that will look personal but will be based on a prepared list of messages that the Foreign Ministry developed.”

Test-firing in the Gaza War

According to Shturman, although it is only now that the project is receiving a budget and a special department in the Foreign Ministry, in practice the Ministry has been using its own responders since the last war in Gaza, when the Ministry recruited volunteer talkbackers. “During Operation Cast Lead we appealed to Jewish communities abroad and with their help we recruited a few thousand volunteers, who were joined by Israeli volunteers. We gave them background material and policy-explanation material, and we sent them to represent the Israeli point of view on news websites and in polls on the Internet,” says Shturman. “Our target audience then was the European Left, which was not friendly towards the policy of the government. For that reason we began to get involved in discussions on blogs in England, Spain and Germany, a very hostile environment.”

And how much change have you effected so far?

“It is hard to prove success in this kind of activity, but it is clear that we succeeded in bypassing the European television networks, which are very critical of Israel, and we have created direct dialogues with the public.”

What things have you done there exactly?

“For example, we sent someone to write in the website of a left-wing group in Spain. He wrote ‘it is not exactly as you say.’ Someone at the website replied to him, and we replied again, we gave arguments, pictures. Dialogue like that opens people’s eyes.”

Elon Gilad, a worker at the Foreign Ministry who coordinated the activities of the volunteer talkbackers during the war in Gaza and will coordinate the activities of the professional talkbackers in the new project, says that volunteering for talkback in defence of Israel started spontaneously: “Many times people contacted us and asked how they could help to explain Israeli policy. They mainly do it at times like the Gaza operation. People just asked for information, and afterwards we saw that the information was distributed all over the Internet. The Ministry of Absorption also started a project at that time, and they transferred to us hundreds of volunteers who speak foreign languages and who will help to spread the information. That project too mainly spreads information on the Internet.”

“You can’t win”

While most of the net-surfers were recruited through websites like giyus.org, which was officially activated by a Jewish lobby [and has basically the same goal and modus operandi], in some cases is it was the Foreign Ministry that took the initiative to contact the surfers and asked them to post talkbacks sympathetic to the State and the government [of Israel] on the Internet and to help recruit volunteers. That’s how Michal Carmi, an active blogger and associate general manager at the high-tech placement company Tripletec, was recruited to the online policy-explanation team.

“During Operation Cast Lead the Foreign Ministry wrote to me and other bloggers and asked us to make our opinions known on the international stage as well,” Carmi tells Calcalist. “They sent us pages with ‘taking points’ and a great many video clips. I focussed my energies on Facebook, and here and there I wrote responses on blogs where words like ‘Holocaust’ and ‘murder’ were used in connection with Israel’s Gaza action. I had some very hard conversations there. Several times the Foreign Ministry also recommended that we access specific blogs and get involved in the discussions that were taking place there.”

And does it work? Does it have any effect?

“I am not sure that that strategy was correct. The Ministry did excellent work, they sent us a flood of accurate information, but it focussed on Israeli suffering and the threat of the missiles. But the view of the Europeans is one-dimensional. Israeli suffering does not seem relevant to them compared to Palestinian suffering.”

“You can never win in this struggle. All you can do is be there and express your position,” is how Gilad sums up the effectiveness so far, as well as his expectations of the operation when it begins to receive a government budget.

(*)  “department for the explanation of Israeli policy” is a translation of only two words in the original Hebrew text: “mahleqet ha-hasbara” – literally, “the department of explanation”. Israeli readers require no elaboration. Henceforth in this article, “hasbara” will be translated as “policy-explanation”. It may also be translated as “public diplomacy” or “propaganda” – trans.

gm

Cecilie Surasky
MuzzleWatch

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U.S. carrying out “targeted killings”

Saturday, July 18th, 2009

Media reports recently exposed efforts by the Bush administration to create a CIA “assassination squad” so secret that former Vice President Dick Cheney ordered the agency to keep Congress in the dark about it. The Wall Street Journal called it a secret plan to “capture or kill al Qaida operatives”; on Thursday, the Washington Post said the program was about to be activated when CIA director Leon Panetta pulled the plug.

But the blaring headlines, and the buzz in the blogosphere, are not just due to more evidence of the ex-veep’s addiction to executive power and behind-the-scenes machinations. It’s that word “assassinate.” Most observers assume that assassination is specifically proscribed by U.S. policy. Except it isn’t, exactly, and while the secret CIA assassination program canceled by Panetta may never have claimed a victim, the U.S. is already carrying out actions that look nearly exactly like assassinations, and doing so within the guidelines of domestic and international law. The United States has had plenty of legal latitude to carry out targeted killings during the so-called war on terror — and has been exercising that option vigorously for the past eight years.

The United States, in fact, has been targeting and eliminating specific al-Qaida and Taliban operatives ever since Congress authorized the use of force against them in September 2001. Just the other day, what were probably unmanned CIA drones killed 43 militants in Pakistan as part of the still unsuccessful effort to assassinate just one man, Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud.

Early last year, Salon reported from the Middle East on targeted killings carried out by the U.S. Air Force in Iraq and Afghanistan. That article explored the sometimes-excruciating process, assisted by military attorneys, of trying to decide who could be killed from the air and under what circumstances, while simultaneously trying not to kill innocent civilians. The military officials at the installation Salon visited were definitely engaged in targeted killing — yet they objected to the use of the term “targeted killing,” much less “assassination.”

Gary Solis, an expert on military law at Georgetown University, said the Bush administration — and now the Obama administration — would take umbrage at characterizing the ongoing CIA drone attacks on specific targets as assassinations. “‘Assassination’ is a civilian term for a politically motivated murder,” Solis said. “Soldiers don’t assassinate. They kill.”

Whatever phrase we use to describe the process, clearly the U.S. has been engaged in targeted killing during the past eight years. So what about those U.S. policies that expressly forbid assassination? It may generate flashbacks to the tortured debate over torture, but it all comes down to semantics. Assassination is OK — as long as you don’t use the word “assassination.”

In 1975, the U.S. Senate formed an 11-member commission called the Church Committee, led by Idaho Sen. Frank Church, to investigate the activities of the CIA. The Church Committee’s many reports detailed efforts by the agency to assassinate such foreign leaders as Fidel Castro, Patrice Lumumba and Rafael Trujillo. Reacting to the committee’s findings, Gerald Ford was the first president to issue what would become a series of executive orders limiting targeted political killings. Ford’s Executive Order 11905 of Feb. 18, 1976, included a specific prohibition of assassination that said, “No employee of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, political assassination.” Jimmy Carter reaffirmed that executive order with his own, as did Ronald Reagan; their versions of the order dropped the modifier “political” from “assassination.” There is no public indication that any president since has rescinded Reagan’s order, so it likely remains in place.

But where there’s a will, there’s a way. When the state wants to kill someone, it has to come up with a rationale for describing that killing as something other than assassination. There are effectively three rules the U.S. government must follow in order to be able to argue that a killing is in accordance with both domestic and international law, and is not an “assassination.” First, the killing must be a military act, an act of war. Second, the target must be definable as military or a civilian engaging in hostile acts against the United States. Third, if the killing takes place within a state with which the U.S. is not at war, the U.S. must have the permission of that country’s government to carry out the hit. The U.S. pursuit of Taliban and al-Qaida targets follows those rules — for the most part — and is compliant with domestic and international law — in theory.

The United States is at war with al-Qaida. The president has the authority to conduct limited military action without congressional approval, but for sustained military action the executive branch needs to be granted legal license by the legislative branch. On Sept. 14, 2001, Congress passed a resolution authorizing “all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons.” The president then signed a secret intelligence “finding” authorizing the CIA to hunt and kill just those kinds of “persons.”

Internationally, the Law of Armed Conflict, that web of treaties including the Geneva Conventions, allows the killing of enemy combatants or even civilians engaged in hostile acts against the United States. Legally, it does not matter where the hit occurs. As long as the U.S. government has the permission of the government where the killing takes place, the killing can occur anywhere in the world. It also does not matter that the people “pulling the trigger” — deploying the drones — are civilian CIA agents, not soldiers. “That is the CIA’s involvement in an armed conflict,” Solis explained. “We have the CIA flying drones killing people who we conceive to be combatants” with the permission of the country where the strikes occur.

But fighting a war against a stateless organization is complicated. The “war on terror” is conducted against anybody deemed the enemy anywhere in the world. The tricky part comes in trying to decide who fits the definition of somebody carrying out hostile acts against the United States. A suspected bomb maker with no uniform? What if he hasn’t made a bomb in a week? A month? A year? Solis said most attorneys would view President Clinton’s 1998 cruise missile strike aimed, in part, at Osama bin Laden as a military operation short of war, not as an assassination attempt. It was undertaken in response to al-Qaida’s attack on the USS Cole, which was clearly a hostile act.

The killing of a person engaged in hostile acts, even by an “assassination squad” of secret agents, would not violate international law — specifically U.N. charter provisions on sovereignty — unless the United States carried out an assassination in a foreign country without the foreign government’s consent. “International law says the U.S. can’t go into country X and do military operations without that country’s consent,” explained David Koplow, a professor specializing in international law and national security law at Georgetown University. “Internationally, so long as you are doing it with the permission of the host country, it is no problem.”

Given this legal framework, Pakistan’s complaints about U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan probably reflect domestic political considerations there, observers speculate, rather than any lack of consent. Pakistan likely quietly gave the CIA the green light. Similarly, U.S. airstrikes in Iraq and Afghanistan documented in the Salon article last year passed legal muster since the governments of Iraq and Afghanistan consented.

Koplow and other experts on international law said while few details of Cheney’s alleged assassination squad are publicly available, legally at least, it’s doesn’t sound like a far stretch from current CIA activities. Ironically, the attorneys add, Cheney could theoretically face stiffer legal consequences under U.S. law for failing to inform Congress about plans for CIA assassinations than he would have had he carried them out. Cheney’s reported decision not to inform Congress might have violated the 1947 National Security Act, which requires that the intelligence committees in Congress are “kept fully and currently informed of the intelligence activities of the United States, including any significant anticipated intelligence activity.”

However, as the Washington Post article states, the intelligence finding that gave rise to the program “imposed no geographical limitations on the agency’s actions.” That raises the possibility that the program would have violated sovereignty. Solis speculated that Cheney’s assassination squad could have been conceived to go a step further and send civilian agents into foreign countries without permission to kill individual people. “Other countries would take a very dim view of that,” he said.

Did the Cheney assassination ring contemplate assassinations in other countries without that country’s permission, which would violate international law? Even if it did, Cheney would likely have escaped sanction, provided he didn’t try to use his passport much. United States domestic law contains no enforcement mechanism for violating a foreign country’s sovereignty, attorneys say. In short, there is no domestic tool to hold Cheney legally liable even if he set up and ran an assassination squad that was taking out al-Qaida operatives in Canada. “Would there be a domestic prosecution?” noted Scott Silliman, an expert on international law at Duke Law. “No. There is nothing there.” But perhaps, like Augusto Pinochet, Cheney could’ve found himself unable to travel abroad without fearing arrest.

Mark Benjamin

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Extent of Iraqis’ torture revealed

Saturday, July 18th, 2009

Have Your Say: Extent of Iraqis’ torture revealed
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