Tijdens de Neurenberg processen werd het excuus ‘Befehl ist Befehl’
onderuit gehaald als onzin, immers je hebt je ten allen tijde
aan de (internationale) rechtsorde te houden en als dat niet kan valt
het toch echt onder jouw eigen verantwoording als je je schuldig
maakt aan (oorlogs-) misdaden….. Ondanks deze juridische geschiedenis, gebruikt Washington dit valse ‘Befehl ist Befehl’ excuus voor de nieuwe directeur van de CIA, Gina Haspel…….
Gina
Haspel, een psychopaat die niet alleen toezag op martelingen, maar ook voor de lol zelf mensen martelde in een geheime
CIA gevangenis in Thailand, is dus door Trump benoemd tot de nieuwe
directeur van de CIA……. Dit nadat Mike Pompeo, tot nu directeur van de CIA, een al even grote psychopaat en voorstander van het disfunctionerende martelen, tot minister van buitenlandse zaken werd benoemd…….
Pompeo heeft meermaals gezegd
dat martelen wel effectief is (wetenschappelijk bewezen onjuist) en dat alles volgens de (VS) wet is
toegestaan…… (dat is niet zo, maar slimme juristen vinden wel een
zwak punt in de wet, waarmee bij wijze van spreken alles
gerechtvaardigd kan worden, ook als het bijvoorbeeld gaat om
martelen…..)
Lees
de volgende stap van de VS in het proces richting het Vierde Rijk
(dat al net zo fascistisch zal zijn als het Derde Rijk, dat blijkt ten
overvloede weer uit het volgende artikel van The Intercept):
WASHINGTON
BREAKS OUT THE “JUST FOLLOWING ORDERS” NAZI DEFENSE FOR CIA
DIRECTOR-DESIGNATE GINA HASPEL
Written by Jon
Schwarz
Mar.
15
DURING
THE NUREMBERG TRIALS after World War II,
several Nazis, including top German generals Alfred Jodl and Wilhelm
Keitel, claimed they were not guilty of the tribunal’s charges
because they had been acting at the directive of their superiors.
Ever
since, this justification has been popularly known as the “Nuremberg
defense,” in which the accused states they were “only following
orders.”
The
Nuremberg judges rejected the Nuremberg defense, and both Jodl and
Keitel were hanged. The United Nations International Law Commission
later codified the underlying
principle from
Nuremberg as “the fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his
Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility
under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible
to him.”
This
is likely the most famous declaration in the history of international
law and is as settled as anything possibly can be.
However,
many members of the Washington, D.C. elite are now stating that it,
in fact, is a
legitimate defense for American officials who violate
international law to claim they were just following orders.
View
of some of the Nazi leaders accused of war crimes during World War II
during the war crimes trial at Nuremberg International Military
Tribunal court, held between Nov. 20, 1945 and Oct. 1, 1946.Photo:
Stringer/AFP/Getty Images
Specifically,
they say Gina Haspel, a top CIA officer whom President Donald Trump
has designated to be the agency’s next director, bears no
responsibility for the torture she supervised during George W. Bush’s
administration.
Haspel oversaw a
secret “black site” in Thailand, at which prisoners were
waterboarded and subjected to other severe forms of abuse. Haspel
later participated in the destruction of the CIA’s videotapes of
some of its torture sessions. There is informed
speculation that
part of the CIA’s motivation for destroying these records may have
been that they showed operatives employing torture to generate false
“intelligence” used to justify the invasion of Iraq.
John
Kiriakou, a former CIA operative who helped capture many Al Qaeda
prisoners, recently
said that
Haspel was known to some at the agency as “Bloody Gina” and that
“Gina and people like Gina did it, I think, because they enjoyed
doing it. They tortured just for the sake of torture, not for the
sake of gathering information.” (In 2012, in a convoluted
case,
Kiriakou pleaded
guilty to
leaking the identity of a covert CIA officer to the press and spent a
year in prison.)
Some
of Haspel’s champions have used the exact language of the popular
version of the Nuremberg defense, while others have paraphrased it.
One
who paraphrased it is Michael Hayden, former director of both the CIA
and the National Security Agency. In a Wednesday
op-ed,
Hayden endorsed Haspel as head of the CIA, writing that
“Haspel did nothing more and nothing less than what the nation
and the agency asked her to do, and she did it well.”
Hayden
later said on
Twitter that
Haspel’s actions were “consistent with U.S. law as interpreted by
the department of justice.” This is true: In 2002, the Office of
Legal Counsel at the Justice Department declared in a series
of notorious
memosthat
it was legal for the U.S. to engage in “enhanced interrogation
techniques” that were obviously torture. Of course, the
actions of the Nuremberg defendants had also been “legal” under
German law.
John
Brennan, who ran the CIA under President Barack Obama, made similar
remarks on Tuesday when asked about Haspel. The Bush administration
had decided that its torture program was legal, said
Brennan,
and Haspel “tried to carry out her duties at CIA to the best of her
ability, even when the CIA was asked to do some very difficult
things.”
Texas
Republican Rep. Will Hurd used the precise language of the Nuremberg
defense during a Tuesday appearance on CNN when Wolf Blitzer asked
him to respond to a statement from Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.: “The
Senate must do its job in scrutinizing the record and involvement
of Gina Haspel in this disgraceful program.”
Hurd,
a member of the House Intelligence Committee and a former CIA
operative as well, told Blitzer that “this wasn’t Gina’s idea.
She was following orders. … She implemented orders and was doing
her job.”
Hurd
also told Blitzer, “You have to remember where we were at that
moment, thinking that another attack was going to happen.”
This
is another defense that is explicitly illegitimate under
international law. The U.N. Convention Against Torture, which
was transmitted to
the Senate by Ronald Reagan in 1988, statesthat
“no exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or
a threat or war, internal political instability or any other public
emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.”
Notably,
Blitzer did not have any follow-up questions for Hurd about his
jarring comments.
Samantha
Winograd, who served on President Obama’s National Security Council
and now is an analyst for CNN, likewise used Nuremberg defense
language in an appearance on the network. Haspel, she
said,
“was implementing the lawful orders of the president. … You
could argue she should have quit because the program was so
abhorrent. But she was following orders.”
Last
but not least there’s Rich Lowry, editor of National Review, who
issued a ringing defense of Haspel in Politico, claiming she
was merely acting “in response to what she was told were lawful
orders.”
Remarkably,
this perspective has even seeped into the viewpoint of regular
journalists. At a recent press conference at which Kentucky
Republican Sen. Rand Paul criticized Haspel, a reporter asked
him to
respond to “the counterargument” that “these policies were
signed off by the Bush administration. … They were considered
lawful at the time.”
It
fell to Paul to make the obvious observation that appears to
have eluded almost everyone else in official Washington: “This
has been historically a question we’ve asked in every war: Is there
a point at which soldiers say ‘no’? … Horrendous things
happened in World War II, and people said, well, the German soldiers
were just obeying orders. … I think there’s a point at which,
even suffering repercussions, that if someone asks you to torture
someone that you should say no.”
(Thank
you to @jeanbilly545 and Scott
Horton for
telling me about Hurd and Paul’s remarks, respectively.)
Top
photo: Gina Haspel speaks at the 2017 William J. Donovan Award
Dinner.
=======================================
Voor een begeleidende video, zie het origineel
Zie ook:
‘Ondervragers van de VS zijn aanwezig bij martelingen in Jemenitische gevangenissen‘
‘Rapport maakt duidelijk dat VAE 23 gevangenen hebben vermoord in Jemenitische gevangenissen‘
‘Michael Hayden (ex-CIA en generaal b.d.): niets mis met martelingen door Gina Haspel…..‘
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