07/24/15 – Marjorie Cohn – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, the Scott Horton Show.
On the line, I've got Marjorie Cohn, former president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, teaches law at the Thomas Jefferson School of Law in San Diego, and is the author of Drones and Targeted Killings, no, pardon me, the editor of Drones and Targeted Killings.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Marjorie?
Good, Scott.
I'm the former president of the National Lawyers Guild.
Oh, I'm sorry.
That's fine.
I screw those things up.
No problem.
I'm fine.
How are you?
National Lawyers Guild.
I should have had that memorized correctly.
Sorry.
That's okay.
Okay.
Now, so yeah, anyway, Thomas Jefferson School of Law, and again, the book is Drones and Targeted Killings.
So that'll have to go on my pile here somewhere.
I'm on the Amazon page right now ordering it.
And so you have the spotlight article today at Antiwar.com, the U.S. aids and abets war crimes in the Philippines.
Take us back to 2001.
Well, 2001, after the 9-11 attacks, Bush declared the Philippines a second front in the war on terror, and the Philippine government used this as an opportunity to basically escalate its war against Muslim separatists and other people who were opposed to the policies of the government.
And the Philippine military and paramilitary committed egregious human rights violations, some of the most underreported atrocities in the media today.
And so I testified as an expert witness last weekend in Washington, D.C. at the International People's Tribunal on Crimes Against the Filipino People, and there were about more than 300 people there with an international panel of jurors who heard testimony for two days from 32 witnesses, many of whom had been tortured, forcibly evicted, lost loved ones, witnessed the killing of their loved ones.
It was a very, very compelling proceeding.
So people might be a little bit familiar with the first part of that story, not so much the war crimes, but the part about Abu Sayyaf, right?
Al-Qaeda in the Philippines, got to go get them.
Didn't hear too much about the war after that, though.
Right.
Well, in 2002, the Arroyo government created a counterinsurgency program that was modeled on the U.S. program, ostensibly to fight communism, but they really went after progressive people who belonged to progressive organizations, activists, human rights activists, labor leaders, anyone who opposed the government.
And after 9-11, the Bush administration gave Arroyo $100 million to fund the campaign.
Then when the Aquino government came in in 2011, they just changed the name but continued this counterinsurgency program, which has led to tremendous repression, including large numbers of extrajudicial killings.
That means outside of any court process, forced disappearances, torture and cruel treatment.
And many civilians, including children, have been murdered.
And especially people who oppose the invasive mining corporations.
You know, indigenous peoples testified at this tribunal about how they were forced off their land to make way for the mining companies.
They had no input into it at all.
And one witness testified it was really an operational, this counterinsurgency program was presented in the guise of peace and development, but it was really an operational guide to crush any resistance by those who work for social justice and support the poor and oppressed.
All right.
Now, so to what degree do you know, did the Bush administration, the CIA, the Special Operations Command guys participate in this, orchestrate this dirty war?
Well, first of all, the part of the Bush policy of the pivot to Asia Pacific as a counterweight to China, it led not just Bush, but Obama to negotiate these agreements to station U.S. troops on the military bases there in the Philippines, which is a violation of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
And the U.S. used the Subic Bay and Clark Air Force bases, military bases for its aggressive war in Vietnam.
And then in 1992, the Philippine government said leave, and the U.S. now wants to go back.
But in terms of how the U.S. actually aided and abetted these violations, and by the way, the International Criminal Court punishes people as war criminals for aiding and abetting war crimes, including providing the means for the commission of the crime.
So between 2001 and 2010, the U.S. government furnished more than $507 million in military aid to the Philippine government, which enabled it to commit war crimes.
And there's direct, there's some direct link between U.S. activity and these violations.
In January of this year, the U.S. planned and helped carry out the botched Mamasipano raid.
Dozens of people died when commandos from the Special Action Force of the Philippine National Police entered Mamasipano, where the separatist Moro Islamic Liberation Front had a stronghold.
The Obama administration had put a $5 million bounty on Marwan's head.
Marwan was a terror suspect.
And according to the Philippine Daily Inquirer, U.S. drones identified Marwan's hiding place, led the commandos to it, and provided real-time management capacity for the operation off the battlefield.
It wasn't on the battlefield, which is, of course, illegal if it's not on the battlefield.
Marwan was killed, but his finger was cut off and disappeared, and it then appeared at an FBI lab in the United States a few days later, where they performed DNA tests on the finger to confirm it was Marwan who has been killed.
Yeah, pretty clear who was in on that whole thing.
All right, so now, I guess a couple things.
I'm sorry, did you say, or could you give us a ballpark on what kind of casualties we're talking about since the terror war or in the Obama years or any kind of way that you could categorize it?
And then if you could talk about your role in this tribunal that was held, where your testimony, I guess, is about the international law that ostensibly forbids Washington, D.C. from doing these things.
Right.
Well, the tribunal documented 262 cases of extrajudicial killing.
That means off the battlefield without any kind of court involved at all, 262 cases.
27 cases of forced disappearance, 125 cases of torture, 1,016 cases of illegal arrest, and more than 60,000 incidents of forced evacuation, many to make way for extraction by mining companies.
And that's just in the last five years, from July 2010 to June 30th of this year.
And those were committed by Philippine police, military, paramilitary, or other state agents operating within the chain of command.
What the Filipino government has been doing and what the U.S. has been assisting with is very similar to what happened in many Latin American countries in the 70s and 80s, where there were torture, disappearances, killing, aided and abetted by the U.S. government, who was supporting these vicious dictators and military leaders in these Latin American countries, ostensibly, again, to fight communism.
So my testimony documented some of these things and also talked about violations of international law.
So the military bases that the U.S. is going to be, last year, Obama negotiated this, what's called an enhanced defense cooperation agreement, which paid lip service to the Philippines maintaining sovereignty over military bases in their country, but actually gives tremendous power to the U.S.
This violates the well-established right of peoples to self-determination in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
Killing civilians and targeting civilians and not distinguishing between civilians and combatants violates the Geneva Conventions.
Desecrating bodies, which also happened, violates the Geneva Conventions.
The torture violates the Convention against Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment and Punishment.
The Philippine military and paramilitary apparently rationalized their harsh treatment as necessary to maintain national security against people and organizations that seek to challenge or even overthrow the government.
But the Convention against Torture says unequivocally, and I quote, no exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability, or any other public emergency may be invoked as a justification for torture.
So there is absolutely no justification ever for torture.
And one witness who was very compelling was a 14-year-old boy who testified he was walking with family members to harvest their crops.
And he said, we were fired upon by soldiers.
We said, we are children, sir.
But the soldiers killed his eight-year-old brother.
And then the witness said, I embraced him.
The soldiers said we were enemies.
He was bleeding.
The bullet exited in the back.
He was dead when my mother saw him.
We made an affidavit against the soldiers.
But it was dismissed by the prosecutor.
And many of these witnesses testified that they had filed complaints and nothing had happened.
And this is part of the whole impunity of the Philippine government.
And in many, many international law treaties, there is a duty to provide relief and reparations to victims.
I also testified to that.
And the Philippine government has been violating that.
But we don't hear about this.
Many people who read my article, which appeared on Truthdig and Huffington Post and a number of other blogs, said they'd never heard about this.
And they knew about the vicious Marcos dictatorship some years back.
But this is just a continuation of the same, aided and abetted by the U.S. government because of so-called strategic interests in the area, turning our head the other way and even facilitating through funding and military, actual soldiers, these human rights violations.
And they are egregious.
I mean, they're just really outrageous.
All right.
Well, listen, I know you're in a rush today, so I'll let you go.
But thank you very much for coming on the show.
Can you tell us real quick where people can learn more about this tribunal and more information about what happened there other than your great article there at Truthdig?
Yes.
If you Google International People's Tribunal on Crimes Against the Filipino People, then you will learn who the judges were.
You'll see my testimony there and also the decision of the jurors, of the jury who found the Aquino government and the U.S. government guilty of these war crimes.
OK.
And I see that's internationalpeoplestribunal.org.
Thanks again, Marjorie.
Good to talk to you.
Thanks so much, Scott.
Bye bye.
All right.
So that's Marjorie Cohn.
She is a professor of law at the Thomas Jefferson School of Law in San Diego and is the former president of the National Lawyers Guild.
Oh, yeah.
No.
And the article at Truthdig is U.S. Aids and Abets War Crimes in the Philippines.
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