Gitmo 'Grrls

(One in a series on Experts at Law)

As mentioned in our recent Read On! Review, a recurrent theme in IntLawGrrl Kristine A. Huskey's new book is, to quote her,

the fact that women are woefully scarce in national security law, my chosen field. I do not mean to convey that I am the only woman in this field, as there are many women writing, speaking about, and practicing nationalsecurity legal issues, specifically relating to Guantánamo ...

She continued:

[E]very one of these women will tell you that they, too, are often the only female speaker on these issues in a conference room or on a panel filled with men. The world can stand to have more women in fields that are traditionally filled by men.

(pp. iv-v) Kristine then proceeded "to name a few" of the Gitmo 'Grrls who jumped to mind. Her list is reproduced here, along with links to these women and some of their works:

► IntLawGrrl Beth Van Schaack, Santa Clara Law. Her IntLawGrrls posts are here; list of other publications is here.

► IntLawGrrl yours truly (thanks, Kristine!), University of California, Davis. My IntLawGrrls posts are here; list of other publications is here.

► Leila Nadya Sadat, Washington University. IntLawGrrls posts about her are here; publications list is here.

► Gitanjali S. Gutierrez, Center for Constitutional Rights, attorney for detainees. IntLawGrrls posts about her are here; her op-ed is here.

► Agnieszka M. Fryszman, partner at Cohen Milstein, attorney for detainees.

► Beth Gilson, attorney for detainees.

► H. Candace Gorman, attorney for detainees, whom the Chicago Tribune recently profiled. She runs 2 Gitmo blogs, here and here.

► Sylvia Royce, attorney for detainees.

► Sarah Havens, Allen & Avery, attorney for detainees.

► Becky Dick, attorney for detainees.

► Hina Shamsi, staff attorney at the National Security Project of the American Civil Liberties Union. Her ACLU blog posts are here.

► Maria LaHood, Center for Constitutional Rights.

► Opinio Juris' Deborah Pearlstein, Princeton University. IntLawGrrls posts about her are here; her OJ posts are here; her publications list is here.

► Karen J. Greenberg, New York University. IntLawGrrls posts about are her here; some publications are listed here; her newest Gitmo book is here.

► Suzanne Spaulding, Bingham Consulting Group and former Executive Director of the National Commission on Terrorism, among many other natsec posts. An op-ed by her is here.

► Kate Martin, Center for National Security Studies. Some of her publications are here.

► Sahar Aziz, formerly an associate at Cohen Milstein, now Senior Policy Advisor at Office for Civil Rights, U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

► Barbara Olshansky, attorney for detainees. Her books are here.

► Jennifer Daskal, formerly senior counterterrorism counsel at Human Rights Watch, now a Department of Justice attorney.

Recognition is due to many other women as well, of course. (Readers' nominations welcome!)

There are, for example, all the IntLawGrrls and guests/alumnae who have contributed posts in IntLawGrrls' "Guantánamo" series. In addition to Beth, Kristine, and I, they are Elena Baylis, Ursula Bentele, Fiona de Londras, Monica Hakimi, Lynne Henderson, Elizabeth L. Hillman, Dawn Johnsen, Michelle Leighton, Pamela Merchant, Naomi Norberg, Hari M. Osofsky, Jaya Ramji-Nogales, and Lucy Reed. Not to mention guests/alumnae Mary L. Dudziak, editor of this book, and Mary Ellen O'Connell, interviewed here, both with respect to post-9/11 issues. Or my University of California colleague Laurel E. Fletcher, co-author of this book, an empirical study of the fate of ex-detainees.

And there are also the women who shared a Quonset-like tent with Jen Daskal and me during the December '08 week that, as posted earlier, I spent observing Gitmo military commissions on behalf of the National Institute of Military Justice. (A fuller account of my visit begins at page 9 of this report, which also includes dispatches from Executive Director Michelle Lindo McCluer and other NIMJ'ers) These tentmates were: Jill Heine, Amnesty International; Stacy Sullivan, Human Rights Watch; and Devon Chaffee, Human Rights First. And don't get me started on the many women journalists I met at Gitmo, or on the women JAG lawyers whom I watched provide excellent representation of various detainees as detailed defense counsel.

Bottom line -- memo to media reps, conference organizers, anthology editors, etc.:

There are many, many women now working in the field of national security. We've given you the list; it's your job to get in touch. As we posted when a similar issue arose years ago, the key is not only having women "in" the supposedly nontraditional fields of law. It's also having them recognized as being there.

On July 16

On this day in ...
... 1862, in the middle of the Civil War and half a year before issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation, Ida B. Wells was born to a couple held in slavery in Holly Springs, Mississippi. Ida attended Freedmen's School Shaw University, but dropped out of school and started working as a teacher at age 16 in order to keep her siblings together after their parents and an infant brother died from yellow fever. Eventually she moved to Memphis, Tennessee, where her refusal to sit in the train car designated for blacks gave rise both to a high-profile court case and to her career as a crusading journalist. She became a co-owner and editor of a leading antisegregation newspaper and an investigative reporter who focused on the crime of lynching. She settled in Chicago, where she helped to organize an African-American boycott of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, married and raised a family, and worked to improve the lot of the city's ever-growing African-American population. Wells traveled as far as Europe to speak in favor of racial equality before her death in Chicago in 1931. She is an IntLawGrrls transnational foremother, thanks to guest/alumna Lynne Henderson. As posted at Legal History blog, Wells also is the subject of a new biography, Ida: A Sword Among Lions (2008) (above left), by Smith College Professor Paula J. Giddings.
... 1945, about 6 weeks after Nazi Germany's surrender, leaders of 3 victorious Allied states -- Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union -- convened at Potsdam "to decide the future of a defeated Germany." Their conference (right) concluded on August 2 with issuance at this city southwest of Berlin of the Potsdam Declaration. It contained not only provisions for the division of Germany into 4 occupied zones, but also a warning, issued on July 26, which warned Japan that if it did not surrender the Allies would resort to

'[t]he full application of our military power, backed by our resolve,' which 'mean[t] the inevitable and complete destruction of the Japanese armed forces and just as inevitably the utter devastation of the Japanese homeland.'

No surrender ensued, and atomic bombs were dropped on Japan on August 6 and 9. (photo credit)

(Prior July 16 posts are here and here.)

Guest Blogger: Lynne Henderson

It's IntLawGrrls' great fortune to feature Lynne Henderson (left) as today's guest blogger.

Professor of Law at the William S. Boyd School of Law, University of Nevada-Las Vegas, Lynne teaches in the areas of criminal law, constitutional law, feminist jurisprudence, and violence against women. She's an expert on victim’s rights, rape and feminist jurisprudence, all of which she's examined in her publications. She earned her bachelor's and law degrees from Stanford, where she was an associate editor of the Stanford Law Review. She's active in the the Society of American Law Teachers. Her work on a SALT committee dealing with human rights issues post-9/11 dovetails with the subject of her guest post below: accountability for interrogation and detention abuses. (It's a topic I broached a while back in this post.)

Lynne dedicates her contribution to Ida B. Wells (1862-1931). "Her courage in publishing, speaking out, and battling for civil rights for Black women and men was huge," Lynne writes of Wells. "In the face of threats, violence, fires, etc. she published as long as she could before having to flee Tennessee to Washington, D.C., but she never gave up educating and trying." Wells (left) campaigned tirelessly, but in vain, for a federal anti-lynching law. Author of an autobiography entitled Crusade for Justice (1928), Wells joins other IntLawGrrls transnational foremothers in the list just below our "visiting from ..." map at right.

Heartfelt welcome!

Rushing to Acquit

(My thanks to IntLawGrrls for inviting me to publish this guest post.)

In the past months, a steadily increasing flow of information strongly suggests that Bush-Cheney Administration officials may have committed or approved of the commission of War Crimes and other violations of international and domestic law in pursuit of its “War on Terror.” In reaction to the building mass of evidence – testimonial, documentary, videotapes, and photographs – of torture and cruel treatment of detainees from Guantánamo to Bagram to Iraq, a number of commentators and pundits have tried to “spin” the evidence away from accountability.
According to these media partisans, no one should be prosecuted, the President should issue pardons to all, and the best option is to have some kind of truth commission later on when it’s all over. Despite a scathing report from the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General in May 2008, reporting the F.B.I.’s observation of a catalogue of abuses at Guantánamo, Attorney General Michael Mukasey has refused to take any action against Justice Department or other officials who may have been involved in sanctioning the use of “enhanced interrogation” methods, including torture.
These “enhanced interrogation” methods, derived from Chinese and Soviet techniques developed to torture U.S. soldiers, have been called “necessary” by those who promulgated their use despite pervasive evidence that such techniques do nothing more than produce false confessions.
Ignoring the legal requirement for investigation and accountability for the use of cruel and inhuman treatment, including the use of torture, is a wholesale abandonment of this country’s commitment to the Rule of Law. I firmly object to a premature pre-emption of possible prosecutions against people who have committed war crimes or other violations of U.S. and international law. It is imperative that the United States, long a supporter of human rights, the Geneva Conventions, and the Convention Against Torture, honor its commitment to these laws. To do otherwise is to abandon the long-standing principles of this nation and to endanger the standing of the United States as an advocate for human rights. To do nothing diminishes the value of the Rule of Law.
I do not deny the horrific violence committed against the United States on September 11, 2001, or the trauma it has caused. I do deny that the attacks of 9/11 absolve the United States of its historic commitment to the Rule of Law. U.S. commitment to laws regulating war arises from deep within American history, something that the architects of the “war on terror” seem to have ignored. The United States first stood for humane treatment of captives during the Revolutionary War, when George Washington forbade his troops from mistreating the British, even if the British tortured Americans. During the Civil War, Lincoln commissioned the Lieber Code establishing a law of war. After World War II, the U.S. was a primary advocate for the Geneva Conventions. And it has honored Geneva and held the Conventions applicable through every war until the “war on terror.” Moreover, the United States is a state party to the Convention Against Torture, and the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, which specifically forbids the military, although not the CIA, from engaging in torture or cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment of “detainees.”
The United States not only helped promulgate the Geneva Conventions, it is a state party and has enacted legislation binding the country to the Conventions. Geneva prohibits the mistreatment of any captive in a war, regardless of status. The Bush Administration lawyers decided, on the basis of one highly criticized Supreme Court case, Ex parte Quirin (1942), to argue that anyone designated an “enemy combatant” had no rights under Geneva or any other law, including the criminal law of the United States. The Geneva Conventions, however, contain no such description or definition. And, since Quirin, the United States has honored Geneva and the Supreme Court has repeatedly held that simply calling someone an “enemy combatant” does not remove the person from the protection of the laws, including Geneva and the Constitution of the United States.
Impunity from prosecutions for war and other crimes is for dictatorships, not democracies. Thus, I steadfastly believe that “impunity” from prosecution for crimes committed by government agents or their superiors – either through pardons or refusals to investigate and prosecute – damages the commitment to the Rule of Law for which the United States has long stood, and for which International Law has stood, for many years. The Nuremberg Principles (1950) made clear that obeying orders from a “higher authority” did not excuse war crimes and crimes against humanity. As a chief prosecutor at the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, and as a country that has long stood for the principle of being a government of laws, not men, the United States cannot and should not abandon the Rule of Law for convenience, its own political comfort, or deniability of crimes committed in the name, if without the approval, of the American people. Ruling out prosecution in advance of the evidence is neither a legal nor a moral option.

(Library of Congress credit for poster above right, captioned "Geneva Conventions: Military personnel and combatants who are captured or who surrender shall not be killed and shall be treated humanely"; credit for © Raymond D'Addario photo of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, serving as Chief U.S. Prosecutor at 1st Nuremberg trial. Cross-posted at CommonDreams.org)