Yahoo News Trump considering pardons for US military members convicted or accused of war crimes, officials say
![Earlier this month, the President granted a full pardon to former Army 1st Lt. Michael Behenna, who had been convicted in 2009 of the premeditated killing of an unarmed and naked Iraqi prisoner who was said to be suspected of belonging to al-Qaeda. Now the rumor is that he will pardon another handful of soldiers in time for Memorial Day weekend. These include Special Operations Chief Edward Gallagher, who is accused of having a personal policy of indiscriminately killing unarmed civilians in Afghanistan; Maj. Matthew Golsteyn, who is accused of killing an unarmed Afghani man; and a group of Marine Corps snipers who urinated on the cadavers of dead Afghanis. All of these men could face severe punishment under the Military Uniform Code of Justice and the US War Crimes act of 1996 if investigated, convicted and prosecuted by the military. Trump’s probable intervention, however, would further politicize what should be left to the realm of judicial independence and military justice – if not the mechanisms of international criminal justice. “Cherif would have believed these men were not worthy of a pardon.” The Cherif that Elaine Klemen-Bassoiuni is referring to here is the one and only late Mahmud Cherif Bassiouni, the so-called “architect of modern international criminal justice” and my former boss and mentor. Bassiouni was many things, among them an aristocrat, a former Egyptian military officer, a DePaul University professor of law, a prolific writer on international criminal law and human rights, one of the world’s foremost international law experts, and framer of the international criminal court – to mention a few. Bassiouni helped draft the UN Convention Against Torture and the laws to prosecute apartheid in South Africa; he was appointed the UN monitor in Afghanistan until the US shut the mission down after he issued critical reports against that country; he headed the committee to document war crimes in Bosnia and the former Yugoslavia, and his report from that mission lead to the founding of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. He was a major force in the development of the International Criminal Court in the Hague. He was a true champion of human rights. As his wife, Elaine Klemen-Bassouni, told me in a phone conversation, “He was a military man himself, he led his own troops in the 1956 war [Suez Canal Crisis] and he fundamentally understood how difficult and how essential it was to follow the military code of ethics.” She went on to tell me that, “Those who have been sentenced or face sentencing need to carry out their sentence because what they have done is destructive to humanity and the concept of justice and to the concept of a so-called ‘just war’ – if you are willing to believe in that.” Since the end of the First World War the term “war crimes” has continued to evolve, and so has international law. At the end of the Second World War, Winston Churchill planned to shoot Nazi military leaders, but it was US Secretary of War Henry Stimson who advocated to President Roosevelt for a trial in an international tribunal. In his opening remarks, US Supreme Court Justice and head of the US prosecutorial team Robert Jackson stated, “That four great nations, flushed with victory and stung with injury, stay the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captive enemies to the judgment of law is one of the most significant tributes that power has ever paid to reason.” America has fallen far from where it once stood in the eyes of the international legal community. Granted, it is true that the Nuremburg Trials were trials of winners: the allied forces were never subjected to investigation or prosecution for war crimes committed by their militaries. But that does not take away from the significance of the achievement: the 1947 Nuremburg Principals laid out what constituted a war crime. This was then later further developed and codified in the Geneva Conventions of 1949, which have been ratified by almost every country on the planet, including the United States. If the US would just prosecute its war criminals like it’s supposed to under military law then there would be no need to worry about international legal responsibility for the commission of war crimes or crimes against humanity – the principal reason why the US withdrew from the International Criminal Court in 2002, after ratifying the treaty in 2000. Allowing for suspected war criminals to evade the appropriate judicial process, however, exposes the true motivations of this administration’s political posturing on global human rights situations like the one in Venezuela, for example. Chicago-based international attorney Dan Swift told me that by staying away from the ICC, the US wants to “uphold the prerogative of the president to put his thumb on the scales of justice in order to further his own domestic political agenda. We saw it with Nixon and Lt. Calley, now we are seeing it with Trump and Special Operations Chief Edward Gallagher and the others.”Trump’s probable Memorial Day pardon of military men accused of war crimes is another hard reminder that this administration cares nothing for justice or rule of law. Along with the Muslim ban, the implicit and sometimes explicit encouragement of racist right-wing violence, warmongering with Iran, friendly meetings with the world’s worst dictators, and his administration’s horrific immigration policy at the southern border, this pardon would show that our president in the White House will now stop at nothing to further his far-right agenda. The era of US influence in international criminal justice has officially ended.Bassiouni — or “Professor”, as many of us who studied under him or worked for him called him — told the Chicago Reader in 1999 that “human nature being what it is, there are those who will always seek power and those who will always abuse it. I'm not cynical, because I believe that as human beings, we are condemned to be optimistic. Our lives depend upon being optimistic.”I’m not sure how he stayed so positive after everything he had seen and lived through. But I deeply admire him for it. So, here's to being optimistic, Professor. But, in all honesty, I’m not sure how much optimism I have left in me.](https://s.yimg.com/ny/api/res/1.2/.euClH5PDPKOqQXJFiZySg--/YXBwaWQ9aGlnaGxhbmRlcjt3PTk2MDtoPTcyMA--/https://media.zenfs.com/en/the_independent_577/bb6ec459225e17b907bf1eba63f75805)
Donald Trump has indicated he is considering pardons for several US military members accused or convicted of war crimes, including high-profile cases of murder, attempted murder and desecration of a corpse, according to two US officials.
The officials said the Trump administration had made expedited requests this week for paperwork needed to pardon the troops on or around Memorial Day.
One request is for Special Operations Chief Edward Gallagher of the Navy SEALs, who is scheduled to stand trial in the coming weeks on charges of shooting unarmed civilians and killing an enemy captive with a knife while deployed in Iraq.
The others are believed to include the case of a former Blackwater security contractor recently found guilty in the deadly 2007 shooting of dozens of unarmed Iraqis; the case of Major Mathew Golsteyn, the Army Green Beret accused of killing an unarmed Afghan in 2010; and the case of a group of Marine Corps snipers charged with urinating on the corpses of dead Taliban fighters.
The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to speak publicly, said they had not seen a complete list and did not know if other service members were included in the request for pardon paperwork.
The White House sent requests on Friday to the Justice Department’s Office of the Pardon Attorney, which alerted the military branches, according to one senior military official. Pardon files include background information and details on criminal charges, and in many cases include letters describing how the person in question has made amends.
The official said while assembling pardon files typically takes months, the Justice Department stressed that all files would have to be complete before Memorial Day weekend, because Mr Trump planned to pardon the men then. A second US official confirmed the request concerning Mr Gallagher.
The military branches referred questions to the Justice Department, which declined to comment on the matter.
Mr Trump has often bypassed traditional channels in granting pardons and wielded his power freely, sometimes in politically-charged cases that resonate with him personally, such as the conviction of former Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Arizona.
Earlier this month, the president pardoned former Army 1st Lieutenant Michael Behenna, who had been convicted of killing an Iraqi during an interrogation in 2008.
While the requests for pardon files are a strong sign of the president’s plans, Mr Trump has been known to change his mind, and it is not clear what the impetus was for the requests. But most of the troops who are positioned for a pardon have been championed by conservative lawmakers and media organisations, such as Fox News, which have portrayed them as being unfairly punished for trying to do their job. Many have pushed for the president to intervene. The White House declined to comment.
Pardoning several accused and convicted war criminals at once, including some who have not yet gone to trial, has not been done in recent history, legal experts said. Some worried that it could erode the legitimacy of military law and undercut good order and discipline in the ranks.
“These are all extremely complicated cases that have gone through a careful system of consideration. A freewheeling pardon undermines that whole system,” said Gary Solis, a retired military judge and armour officer who served in Vietnam.
“It raises the prospect in the minds of the troops that says, ‘Whatever we do, if we can get the folks back home behind us, maybe we can get let off.’”
Mr Gallagher’s lawyer, Timothy Parlatore, was surprised by the news that the president could be considering a pardon, and said ideally the chief would be acquitted at trial.
“We want the opportunity to exonerate my client,” Mr Parlatore said in an interview. “At the same time, there is always a risk in going to trial. My primary objective is to get Chief Gallagher home to his family. To that end, Chief Gallagher would welcome any involvement by the president.”
The fact that the requests were sent from the White House to the Justice Department, instead of the other way around, is a reversal of long-established practices, said Margaret Love, who served as the US pardon attorney during the first Bush administration and part of the Clinton administration.
Process aside, Ms Love said that pardoning the men would be an abrupt departure from the past.
“Presidents use pardons to send messages. They recognise when a process wasn’t just or when punishments were too extreme, like for some nonviolent drug cases,” she said.
“If this president is planning to pardon a bunch of people charged with war crimes, he will use the pardon power to send a far darker message.”
The New York Times
