Copyright 2001 Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service
Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service
The Philadelphia Inquirer
October 6, 2001, Saturday
SECTION: DOMESTIC NEWS
KR-ACC-NO: K4003
LENGTH: 861 words
HEADLINE: Action without clear proof of bin Laden's guilt could undermine U.S.
BYLINE: By Joseph A. Slobodzian
BODY:
PHILADELPHIA _ In the court of U.S. public opinion, Osama bin Laden has already been convicted in absentia of first-degree murder in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
But, in a court of law, would the evidence meet legal standards? Is there enough proof to indict, let alone attack, bin Laden?
It's not just a philosophical debate among academicians. Some experts worry that in a rush to avenge the dead, the U.S. government will flout and undermine legal treaties that have taken decades to forge.
Without clear public proof justifying to the world a strike at bin Laden, some legal scholars say, the U.S. could sow the seeds for a new generation of terrorists and, possibly, a war beyond expectation.
Others maintain it is a mistake to try to impose standards of law and evidence _ U.S. or international _ on the events of Sept. 11.
Francis Boyle, a University of Chicago professor of international law who has argued before the International Court of Justice at The Hague, said he hears disturbing echoes of World War I in the pace of current events.
"That was begun by an act of terrorism, too," Boyle said, referring to the 1914 assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand by a Serb nationalist.
"Austria-Hungary issued an ultimatum, Serbia refused, Russia mobilized and you had 10 million dead," Boyle said. "They thought they could manage the war
and learned that they couldn't. We have no idea what the ultimate consequences may be. We could wind up with a regional cataclysm."
Both Boyle and John B. Quigley, a professor of international law at Ohio State University, said they were worried that some foreign officials viewed the U.S. evidence as circumstantial ties to al-Qaida but not necessarily to Bin Laden.
"It looks as if they have links to people who have links to him but nothing else," Quigley said. "That would make it difficult to show ... he has any criminal responsibility in the Sept. 11 attacks."
"It's conceivable they may have other evidence," Quigley added, "but if they had such evidence I would think they would be using it."
Others disagree.
"It's hypothetical," said Temple University law professor James A. Strazzella, a former federal prosecutor and expert on criminal law and procedure. "I don't think you can use criminal law terms and the responses that would be measured by any court to what is perceived by our government as an act of war. We have never done this with any war we've fought."
Secretary of State Colin Powell recently described the case against bin Laden as "solid," adding: "Let's not see it in terms of one that's going to trial in a court, evidence in the form of a court case. It is information and intelligence ...that leaves no doubt in my mind ... all paths lead to al-Qaida and bin Laden."
Philadelphia lawyer Michael M. Baylson, the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania during the first Bush Administration, said he believes the circumstantial evidence linking bin Laden to terrorism and the Sept. 11 attacks would support his arrest if he were in the United States.
"The federal conspiracy law is very broad," Baylson added. "I would certainly like to take it before a grand jury to see if we could get at his whole network ... Spread the net over as many people as possible."
Boyle said the International Court of Justice has held since 1949 that countries are not justified in invading others without persuasive evidence of a purposeful attack from the other country.
Both the United States and Afghanistan, Boyle said, also signed the 1971 Montreal Sabotage Convention, which requires signatories to adjudicate issues related to sabotage, rather than resorting to force. The international treaty was used by the U.S. in obtaining for trial the Libyan defendants in the destruction of an airliner over Lockerbie, Scotland.
Ten years ago, President Bush's father sought and obtained United Nations approval for the Gulf War and obeyed international restrictions on how far he could take the war into Iraq, Boyle said.
Beyond questions of evidence and international law, argues Chaim Kaufman, a professor of international relations at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pa., it is in the United States' interest to prove to the world why it takes the actions it does.
"The bigger issue is that we have got to look at things from the point of view of the goals of the terrorists," Kaufman said.
"There are probably thousands of Muslims, most of whom have very little love for the United States, but hardly any of them are willing to be mobilized for terrorism," Kaufman said. "It's a time-honored terrorist response to provoke an attack on your own group. They hope to get us to radicalize and create the next generation of martyrs ... We should not play into their hands."
"Our public is more than satisfied (with the evidence)," Kaufman said. "The public we have to reach for is the public of the Muslim world. We have to convince them that what we do is not another example of American arrogance or American genocide."
___
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Copyright 2001 P.G. Publishing Co.
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
October 7, 2001 Sunday FIVE STAR EDITION
SECTION: FORUM, Pg.A-1
LENGTH: 916 words
HEADLINE: BETWEEN A ROCK AND A HARD COALITION
BODY:
The problem for President Bush, Dennis B. Roddy suggests, is
that the United States could find itself alone -- or so crowded with allies that
it cannot act decisively
Afghanistan is neither Vietnam nor Kuwait, but the distance between the
fiery rhetoric of President Bush and the tentative language of
coalition-building could explain the choices before us now: a war we could lose
for lack of will, or one we could abandon at the gates of victory for lack of
permission.
After an address to the Congress in which he declared there was no room for
negotiation with the Taliban and no space for equivocation by potential allies,
the president was given a virtual blank check to wage an undefined war in no
specified land mass.
Since then, as the experts see it, he has gone in search of a place to cash
that check -- dispatching Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to the Middle
East in search of a "rolling coalition" to support any use of these unlimited
war powers.
Ten years ago, Bush's father was a man with war powers defined very
specifically by the United Nations Security Council, which authorized its
members, in uniquely clear language, to kick Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait. The
U.S. Senate responded by giving Bush war powers that mimicked that language and
Bush, after a military success that produced fewer military deaths than are
ordinary in peacetime, stopped on the road to Baghdad, later explaining he had
authority to do no more.
"You'll note, the current President Bush is trying desperately to cobble
together some legal basis internationally for what he's doing," said Francis
Boyle, a specialist in international law at the University of Illinois. "They
have now tried three times to get a U.N. Security Council resolution authorizing
war against Afghanistan, and they have failed."
The U.N. Security Council, in fact, offered up Resolution 1473, which
vaguely invokes the U.N. Charter, but does no more.
"Nor should we go back and try to get more," advised Kim R. Holmes, vice
president of the conservative Heritage Foundation, and author of a paper titled
"Beware of Constraints Imposed by International Coalition."
The danger, as Holmes sees it, is that the United States, in seeking to
construct a coalition after the president has already been given the go-ahead
for war, will hamstring itself in ways that make the war impossible to fight.
He spoke the day news agencies reported that the United States held back on
strikes against Afghanistan because Saudi Arabia, Oman and Uzbekistan had balked
at quick action.
"That's precisely the kind of thing that should not happen," Holmes said.
"You don't want to make the coalition a strategic end of this. It is a means,
not an end."
Politically, Bush is now between two magnetic poles. One demands that he hew
closely to international law, meaning a man who has promised unencumbered
warfare on terror is somehow expected to temper this resolve to fit the demands
of partners in a coalition he is only now building. The other insists that the
creation of the coalition itself is a betrayal of the larger purpose:
eradicating those who killed nearly 7,000 Americans.
"Rhetorically, we are at war. Legally, not," said Boyle, the law professor.
Michael O'Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, has warned
against too broad a war action.
"We cannot win the struggle against terrorism without the full-fledged
cooperation of other countries. A few -- notably Pakistan, but also Saudi
Arabia, one or more Central Asian republics, Britain, Turkey and possibly even
Iran -- will be important for military operations."
But of those on that list, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan have provided both the
religious basis and human bodies from which al-Qaida functions, Turkey straddles
an uncomfortable bridge between Western and Islamic values, and Iran's
government still sponsors an annual "Death to America Day."
What Rumsfeld is now trying to build is a "rolling coalition" that builds
consensus among selected countries necessary for specific military operations,
then tactically shifts to another collection of allies for the next operation.
The danger, of course, is that the United States could find itself either
totally alone or so crowded with allies that it cannot act decisively.
That is where the Vietnam analogy could come in: a long war without decisive
victories.
Already, scholars such as Boyle see discomforting signs in Bush's
unwillingness to share the evidence tying bin Laden and his allies to the Sept.
11 attacks, while presumably passing it on to other states in search of their
support.
The essential support for a war based, if nothing else, on the faith of the
American people, is their continuing faith.
"It's basically emotional support," said Holmes. It was that support that
withered after a decade in Vietnam, causing a politically paralyzed government
to watch while refugees fled to the rooftops in Saigon in 1975.
Where Bush could lose, warns Holmes, is not in trying and failing, but being
seen as trying not at all.
"So long as the American people believe the president is acting decisively
-- including planning -- the American people will not only give him the benefit
of the doubt, they will support him.
"The point is the American people are giving him support because they expect
him to succeed."
The question is whether Bush's putative allies will give him permission to
succeed. Or whether he should ask.
Copyright 2001 Financial Times Information
All rights reserved
Global News Wire
Copyright 2001 Al Nisr Publishing LLC
Gulf News
October 1, 2001
LENGTH: 1600 words
HEADLINE: REALITIES OF AFGHANISTAN
BYLINE: NASIM ZEHRA
BODY:
While the various elements of Washington's response, code named Operation
Enduring Freedom, to the terrorist attacks of September 11 are still to
crystallise, work on one objective has already begun – the objective of
removing the Taliban regime from Afghanistan.
The Taliban have left no doubt in anyone's mind that they will not surrender
Osama bin Laden and his 13 other collaborators to the U.S.
The deadlock over the Osama issue remains despite the unprecedented step
taken by Taliban leader Mulla Omar, after advise from the Pakistani delegation
that visited him on September 17.
He asked a 1,000-man strong ulema shura to advise him on Osama's future.
Recognising the possibility of a U.S.-led military attack on Afghanistan the
shura recommended that Osama be asked to voluntarily leave Afghanistan.
Endorsing the decision Mulla Omar announced that the decision will be conveyed
to Osama.
The Taliban leadership like many others in the Muslim and non-Muslim world,
including American specialists in international law like Francis Boyle and
Richard Falk, have asked that Washington must produce evidence against Osama in
an independent court to ensure that he gets a fair hearing.
Many have identified the International Court in of Justice in the Hague as a
possibility for Osama's trial.
Specialists in international law question the legal validity of Washington's
demand that Osama be surrendered to the U.S. government or of Washington's
demand articulated by U.S. President George Bush to acquire "Osama dead or
alive."
The point of fighting the scourge of international terrorism by violating
international law which is against capture of a foreign citizen residing on
foreign land by a state without possession of legal arrest warrants has also
been raised.
All these arguments notwithstanding the logical move by any individual or
state interested in genuinely exposing Osama would be to insist on a fair and
open trial of Osama.
Those who otherwise lionise him would be forced to question whether his acts
of killing innocents is not directly in conflict with Quranic injunctions which
declare that the murder of one innocent person is tantamount to murdering the
entire human race.
In the crisis that emerged around the Osama issue indeed existed the
opportunity for initiating a much broader debate on the issue of violence and of
double standards for people engaged in struggles and for the state apparatus and
government often attempting to tackle the growing cancer of terrorism – of
use of force against innocent people.
A fair trial in an international setting would indeed raise some of the most
difficult issues that the human race currently faces; of how to roll-back the
ease with which "your freedom fighters or my terrorists" take to violence, blind
hate and mass destruction.
These are indeed the issues that left unexamined and debated logically and
honestly will be responsible for the elimination of much of the human pain and
destruction in months and years to come.
But in a world where the rule of the jungle prevails, where state-power
overlooks all moral issues, where law enforcement is still largely dependant on
coercive measures, especially within the context of inter-state relations,
viewing Osama's trial as an opportunity to wisely fight terrorism would be a
far-fetched act.
That being so, it still does not take away from the basic force of the
argument that a fair trial for Osama would be the logical step to take. One
weighty argument against Osama's fair and publicised trial could be that it
would provide Osama the world stage enabling him to project his own world view;
a view that could lead to further dissensions and divisions within societies and
civilisations.
Preventing a fair trial will unleash it own dynamics. The capture or death of
an untried Osama against the backdrop of blatantly double-standard policies
adopted by organisations like the UN Security Council, whose charter claims
that all states are equal, will ensure the multiplication of the Osama factor.
That the principle guardians may one day see wisdom in tackling the roots of
the problem of growing induction of violence as a legitimate tool against
oppression shall remain an unfulfilled dream.
Hence the first major step being taken under Operation Enduring Freedom will
be the deployment of U.S. military force in collaboration with the Afghan
opposition the Northern Alliance, to add a national colour to what will
essentially be an international military onslaught against the Taliban
government.
The Taliban government which did not cooperate with the international
community, including its supporter Pakistan, on the issue of terrorism and has
been unable to evolve into an effective governing still managed to remain in
power for five years controlling over 90 per cent territory despite repeated and
collaborative efforts made by Russia, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and India to
military defeat the Taliban by supporting the multi-group opposition called the
Northern Alliance.
Equally unsuccessfully since 1998 Washington applied, often through the UN,
political pressure through sanctions in the face of deteriorating humanitarian
conditions and through funding a Rome initiative aimed at preparing an
alternative Pakhtun leadership after the Taliban are militarily defeated.
None of this worked. The Taliban survived. The Northern Alliance were
provided sufficient military hardware but were always short on manpower.
Fighting against the Taliban even for the otherwise economically deprived
Afghans living in the non-Taliban controlled areas never became a popular form
of employment.
This summer as the patron states of the Northern Alliance met in Dushanbe,
India and Iran offered to increase the stipends for the soldiers. Still the war
industry never gained enough popularity to end the manpower shortage faced by
the Northern Alliance.
A few days before the dreadful September 11 terrorist attacks the military
commander of the Northern Alliance Ahmad Shah Massood was assassinated by
suicide bombers posing as journalists.
The London-based Guardian, in a special report, reveals a U.S. plan to
overthrow the Taliban regime on September 11, "the U.S. government is pressing
its European allies to agree to a military campaign to topple the Taliban regime
in Afghanistan and replace it with an interim administration under United
Nations auspices".
Diplomatic cables from the Washington embassy of a key Nato ally, seen by the
Guardian, report that the U.S. is keen to hear allied views on "post-Taliban
Afghanistan after the liberation of the country".
According to the Guardian "two large U.S. Hercules transport aircraft landed
in Tashkent, capital of the former Soviet republic of Uzbekistan, on Tuesday
loaded with surveillance equipment to be installed along the northern Afghan
border."
The Guardian noted that "The secret landing represented a radical departure
since it appeared to herald the deployment of squadrons of U.S. fighters at
Uzbekistan's sprawling airfield at Termez, directly on the border. Such a
build-up would incur the wrath of Russia which views the central Asian republics
as its backyard."
The first phase of Operation Enduring Freedom is underway. Looking at Afghan
history, the ground realities, the difficulty in capturing human targets, the
in-fighting among the National Alliance, the political fragility of the former
King Zahir Shah, the nationalist and Islamist factor invoked by the Taliban who
chose to fight back, the undetermined nature of the aerial campaigns in an
Afghanistan which does not present military targets as existed in Iraq, the
absence of reliable human intelligence, the extent and nature of collateral
damage done through air raids are some of the elements that will influence the
outcome of the war that U.S., Russia, Iran and other neighbours have launched on
Afghan territory.
Past the war and removal of the Taliban regime from Kabul and Kandahar will
be the challenge of "putting" an acceptable government in Kabul. Removal of the
Taliban using this military might may be possible but there will be no
sustainable political solutions following a "military victory" of the
international coalition against the Taliban.
Soon Washington may realise that what appears to be easily doable and without
much criticism after the September 11 terrorist attack in the U.S., may prove to
be far more complex and costly.
The reality also is that while Pakistan has promised support in the
international fight against the Taliban, unlike the other states including Iran
who have assured Taliban that their territory will not be used for an attack
against the regime, the Iranians like the Russians and the Uzbeks and Indians
are all in the front-line of the first battle that is underway as part of the
U.S. Operation Enduring Freedom.
Pakistanis have still to be asked for specific support to further this battle
against the Taliban. Their news about their role ironically is however the most
prominent although their pledges have still to turn into a reality.
Pakistanis understand the risks of a deep involvement in any anti-Afghanistan
operation alongside the Americans. Pakistan's geography and history are
inextricably intertwined with that of its hapless neighbour.
This perspective is by Nasim Zehra, an analyst on Pakistani affairs based in
Islamabad.
===== Kevin Dean Buffalo, NY ICQ: 8616001 http://www.yaysoft.com
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