In October, lawyers for Amnesty Inter- national (Canada) and the U.S-based Cen- ter for Constitutional Rights (CCR) tried to block President Bush’s visit to Vancouver by presenting Canada’s Attorney General with over 4,000 pages of documentation supporting their charges of torture and war crimes. The CCR has also filed cases seek- ing accountability for torture in Germany and France under the doctrine of universal jurisdiction and has submitted expert opin- ions and other documentation to ongoing cases against Bush administration officials in Spain.


On the financial front, a New York judge


recently sentenced hedge fund billionaire Raj Rajaratnam to eleven years in what The New York Times called “the longest ever prison sentence for insider trading,” refer- ring to it as “a watershed moment in the government’s aggressive two year cam- paign to root out the illegal exchange of confidential information on Wall Street.”22 Philippe Sands, a British human rights lawyer best known for his role in the war crimes arrest of former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet in a London hospital bed in 1994, is an inveterate optimist when it comes to closing the impunity gap. He told the Andover conference in 2008: “You never know what will happen. This [arrest] happened twenty-five years ago and ten years after Pinochet left office. Things take time.” Dean Velvel agreed, noting that things happen when there is political will to make them happen. “Lawyers and judges won’t act unless there is a grassroots move- ment.”


The accountability movement is in its in-


fancy. But it is already showing that in this age of globalization, it has the power to spread rapidly and to join with other strug- gles for true democracy and equal rights under the law.


___________________ Charlotte Dennett, Esq., is a lawyer, au-


thor, and investigative journalist based in Cambridge, Vermont. She ran for Attor- ney General of Vermont in 2008 and 2010 on issues of accountability, and wrote a book about the 2008 campaign, The Peo-


ple v Bush, published by Vermont publish- er Chelsea Green. She is a member of the Justice Robert Jackson Steering Commit- tee (comprised of lawyers and journalists from around the U.S.) and has authored the group’s FOIA requests to the Depart- ment of Justice regarding U.S. torture poli- cies (www.lawsnotmen.org).


____________________ 1


Glenn Greenwald interviewed on DEMOCRACY


NOW!, Oct. 26, 2011, about his new book, WITH LIBERTY AND JUSTICE FOR SOME: HOW THE LAW IS USED TO DESTROY EQUALITY AND PROTECT THE POWERFUL (2011), http://www.democracynow.org/2011/10/26/


glenn_greenwald_on_two_tiered_us. 2


Surge in New York, N.Y. TIMES, April 15, 2009. 3


glenn_greenwald_on_two_tiered_us. 4


fox.net/news_details.php?sid=541. 5


Prosecutions Lag as Foreclosure Swindles White House Press Secretary James Car-


ney, quoted on DEMOCRACY NOW!, Oct. 26, 2011, http://www.democracynow.org/2011/10/26/


Assad and Saleh Have to be Held Accountable and Prosecuted, YEMEN FOX NEWS, http://yemen-


Credit goes to Rutland attorney Jeff Taylor, who discovered Thomas Jefferson’s 1801 MANUAL OF PARLIAMENTARY PRACTICE, which is still used and allows for various routes to impeachment, includ- ing state legislatures calling on the U.S. House of Representatives to set impeachment in motion. What became known as the “Rutland Resolu- tion” caught fire in Vermont, passed the Vermont Senate, but was defeated in the Vermont House. Had it passed, it would have required Congress to take up the impeachment of George W. Bush. For more on Vermont’s involvement in impeach- ment, see CHARLOTTE DENNETT, THE PEOPLE V BUSH, ONE LAWYER’S CAMPAIGN TO BRING THE PRESIDENT TO JUSTICE AND THE NATIONAL GRASS ROOTS MOVEMENT


SHE ENCOUNTERS ALONG THE WAY 103 (2010). 6


DVD’s of the entire Andover conference are available through the Massachusetts School of Law. To order, contact Rosa Figuerido at rosa@


msl.edu. 7


The Geneva Conventions, promulgated after


World War II, prohibit the mistreatment of any- one picked up in the course of war. Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions prohibits “murder, mutilation, cruel treatment, torture, outrages against personal dignity, particularly


humiliating and degrading treatment.” 8


The full title is “ The Convention against Tor-


ture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (the “Torture Conven- tion”),” and was adopted by the General Assem- bly of the United Nations on 10 Dec. 1984 (res- olution 39/46). The Convention was ratified by twenty states and entered into force on 26 June 1987. For more, see http://untreaty.un.org/cod/ avl/ha/catcidtp/catcidtp.html.


9


The War Crimes Act of 1996, 18 U.S.C. Sec- tion 2441, describes war crimes as “any conduct” prohibited in Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, and holds anyone who commits a war crime, “whether inside or outside the Unit- ed States,” to be criminally liable—subject to fines, life imprisonment, or “if death results to the victim, shall also be subject to the penalty of


death.” 10


Scott Horton, a constitutional lawyer who writes a regular column for Harpers Magazine, has reminded readers that lawyers have been prosecuted and imprisoned in the past for issu- ing opinions like the opinions that were issued [at Nuremberg] … that enabled torture and enabled the violation of the laws of war.” Quoted in DEN-


NETT, supra note 3, at 133. 11


org. 12


For this and other quotes from Justice Jack- son, see the website of the Justice Robert Jack- son Steering Committee at www.lawsnotmen.


I later asked Christopher Pyle how he felt


about going public against members of the Bush Administration. “Perhaps,” he responded, you should ask me how I feel about my government torturing people.” Pyle, clearly, was not easily in- timidated, and when I probed more I discovered that he had led a campaign in 1970 involving his law students at the U.S. Army Intelligence School against illegal government surveillance of anti- war protesters, resulting in the Church Commit-


tee hearings on intelligence abuses. Id. at 129. 13


Among those openly opposed to the military commission system were William Howard Taft IV (Secretary of State Colin Powell’s lawyer), Rear Admirald Donald Guter, then the Navy’s top law- yer, and conservative columnist William Safire, who declared that Bush’s “kangaroo courts” had turned “back the clock on all advances in military justice through three wars in the past half centu- ry.” See William Safire, Seizing Dictatorial Power,


N.Y.TIMES, Nov. 15, 2001. 14


Dratel has the distinction of being one of


the first private lawyers to defend a detainee at Guntanamo. Having made over a dozen trips to Cuba, he witnessed the military commission sys- tem firsthand. (“This system is illegal; its sole pur- pose is to convict,” he told me, “just like in a Star


Chamber.”) 15


See, for example, N.Y. TIMES, April 23, 2009. 16 DENNETT, supra note 3, at 92. See also Obama


Team Feared Coup If He Probed War Crimes, http://www.justice-integrity.org/index.php? option=com_content&view=article&id=460%3A obama-team-feared-coup-death-if-he-prosecut-


ed-war-crimes&catid=44%3Amyblog. 17


Bruce Fein, a Justice Department lawyer in


the Reagan Administration who is now a critic of presidential power, predicted that the next presi- dent would “take everything Bush has given him and wield it with even greater confidence be- cause Congress has given him a safe harbor to do so with impunity.” Fein quoted in After the Impe-


Marc Ambinder, Poor Judgment: Yoo, Bybee and the Torture Memos, Feb. 19 2010, www.the-


rial Presidency, N.Y. TIMES MAG., Nov. 7, 2008. 18


atlantic.com . 19


Two American Men Can Sue Donald Rumsfeld After ‘Being Tortured’ by U.S. Army in Iraq When They Worked for Security Firm, DAILY MAIL (UK),


Aug. 9, 2011. 20


Court Rules Torture Claim Against Rumsfeld May Move Forward, Aug. 4, 2011, www.thecon-


stitutional.org. 21


notmen.org. 22


All FOIA filings by the Justice Robert Jackson Steering Committee can be viewed at www.laws-


Hedge Fund Founder Raj Rajaratnam Sen- tenced to 11 Years in Insider Trading Case, N.Y. TIMES, Oct. 13, 2011.


34 THE VERMONT BAR JOURNAL • FALL 2011 www.vtbar.org


Closing the Impunity Gap


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44