I recently visited Google’s Mountain View, CA headquarters to discuss my book Constitutional Limits on Coercive Interrogation. This event took place on August 18, 2008, as part of the Authors@Google series.
View my part of the series here on youtube.com.
In The Constitutional Limits of Coercive Investigation, I offer a theoretical analysis and a practical application of coercive interrogation, and in doing so, suggest developing and implementing a hybrid paradigm based on American criminal law, the Geneva Convention, and the Israeli model of trial as the most relevant judicial regime. I offer a unique perspective to the public debate by utilizing a historical analysis of the system of “justice” for African-Americans in the Deep South of the past century to serve as a guide for the constitutional rights and protections which need to be granted or extended to an unprotected class. I then indicate which interrogation methods are within the boundaries of the law by both recommending protection of the detainees and providing interrogators with the tools required to protect America’s vital interests.
Cross-posted on National Security Advisors.
Our good friends over at Opinio Juris have rolled out a fantastic new website as part of their partnership with Oxford University Press. (This coming on the same day that the new Convictions blog goes on hiatus). OJ, already the best international law blog on the net, has now upped the ante— perhaps vying for top blawg status against the likes of Volokh and Concurring Opinions. Regardless, the blog looks great, and it’s one more innovative example of why you should send your manuscript to Oxford University Press.
Of course, a blog is only as good as its contributors, and for that matter only as good as its frequent contributors, (I know, I know, we aren’t doing so hot on this mark) Opinio Juris consistently maintains fresh and interesting content from a variety of perspectives. With their new look, they’ve also added the expertise of Ken Anderson (formerly of his own blog Law of War and Just War Theory). I was on an ASIL panel with Ken and was a big fan of his blog, and I’m sure he will be a great addition to an already strong team.
So, a big congrats to Opinio Juris on your newly redesigned blog. Hopefully Volokh’s “green machine” will follow suit.
Amos Guiora will be among a group of experts being interviewed tomorrow, December 3, 2007 on the use of third-world contractors in Iraq. The interview can be heard live on KUER 90.1, a public radio station licensed to the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. The program is also distributed by PRI on XM Public Radio Channel 133 at 11:00 a.m. Mountain / 1:00 p.m. Eastern and repeated at 7:00 p.m. on KUER 90.1
The interview profiles the following article written by Matt LaPlante which appears in today’s Salt Lake Tribune.
Human rights, safety at issue in exporting security
By Matthew B. LaPlante
Salt Lake Tribune
Mario Urquia’s story is backed up by passport stamps, a voided visa, photographs, contracts, personal letters, military documents, Honduran government officials, an American attorney and Honduran news reports.
But perhaps most significantly, his complaints are consistent with the results of a recent investigation of the billion-dollar security contracting industry by the United Nations Working Group on the Use of Mercenaries, which has exposed systemic abuses among security contractors and subcontractors who recruit in third-world nations.
According to a report issued last year, the U.N. group found “irregularities of contracts, harsh working conditions with excessive working hours, partial or non payment of remuneration, ill-treatment and isolation, and lack of basic necessities such as medical treatment and sanitation,” among security recruits from Honduras who took jobs in Iraq. The group made similar findings regarding workers from Chile, Peru, Ecuador and Fiji all nations with rampant poverty in which U.S.-based private security companies regularly recruit and has received similar reports of abuses in more than a dozen other countries.
José Luis Gómez del Prado, the Spanish expert who heads the U.N. group, said investigators “found the same things in all these countries. There is a series of military and private security companies that obtain a contract from the Pentagon or the State
Department of the United States and then subcontract other companies which go to third world countries because the workforce is cheaper.”
Gómez del Prado said the system has little oversight and is rife with abuse.
But the bottom line, he added, is that the contractors “are civilians who have guns in a war zone and that goes against international laws.”
The United States is not a signatory on the International Convention against the Recruitment, Use, Financing and Training of Mercenaries, but it nonetheless has been resistent to call members of its private army “mercenaries.”
The U.S. State Department uses private security contractors to augment small detachments of U.S. Marines at embassies around the world. The department declined to respond to questions regarding the legal and ethical propriety of using workers from impoverished countries in its warzone facilities.
But the U.S. Mission to U.N. offices in Geneva disputes Gómez del Prado’s conclusion that the hiring of third-world security contractors constitutes “a new form of mercenary activity.”
“Accusations that U.S. government-contracted security guards, of whatever nationality, are mercenaries is inaccurate and demeaning to men and women who put their lives on the line to protect people and facilities every day,” an October statement from the mission said.
But as the U.S. and U.N. officials parse words, the extent of the exploitation continues to be overlooked, said Jen Daskal, who studies the policies and conduct of the U.S. military for the nonprofit Human Rights Watch.
No matter what terminology is used, Daskal said, “there’s a complete lack of oversight in terms of how contractors find, pay and treat their employees when they’re hired.
Daskal called the issue “a huge problem,” but said no one in the U.S. Government seems to want to do anything about it. “There appears to be a lack of political will,” she said.
With growing scrutiny in the wake of a number of high-profile incidents involving private security companies in Iraq, Daskal is hopeful that legislation aimed at making individual contractors easier to prosecute when they commit criminal acts might, as a tertiary consequence, also bring the force of U.S. labor regulations over the process.
That, she said, might help end the most egregious abuses including some reported cases, like Urquia’s, in which “people are basically taken into indentured servitude.”
But no pending legislation would stop companies such as Blackwater, DynCorp and Triple Canopy those three security companies alone have taken in more than $2.5 billion in contracts in Iraq from recruiting workers from poor countries to risk their lives for a few dollars a day. Of that, Daskal said, “there’s nothing that has any momentum going forward right now. There’s very little outcry or even knowledge of what’s going on over there.²
That deeply concerns Amos Guiora. The national security expert, a professor at the University of Utah’s S.J. Quinney School of Law, said all Americans should be concerned with “who is fighting our battles.” He wonders what message the United States sends about its intentions and commitments overseas when such a large part of its foreign-deployed forces aren’t even Americans. And notwithstanding the obvious human rights issues, he said, there is a very clear question as to the risks the U.S. government is taking by exporting its security to the lowest bidder.
If a mercenary from Honduras will man a guard tower for the United States for $31 a day, Guiora wondered, what would he do for $32?
“When you look at the tactical, geo-strategic and geo-political risks,” he said, “from all perspectives, it¹s lose, lose, lose.”
—
mlaplante@sltrib.com
To listen to archived RadioWest programs visit:
http://www.kuer.org/kuer_podcasting.html
Cross-posted on National Security Advisors Blog
I have argued, “Quirin to Hamdan: Creating a Hybrid Paradigm for the Detention of Terrorists”, Florida Journal of International Law (forthcoming) and “Where are Terrorists to be Tried - A Comparative Analysis of Rights Granted to Suspected Terrorists“, Catholic University Law Review, Vol. 56, No. 2, Spring 2007 for the need to establish an alternative legal paradigm for bringing to trial individuals presently detained in Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib.
My proposal would require amending the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Court so that it would function as a domestic terror court. The defendants would be granted most—but not all—of the criminal law rights available to defendants in the Article III courts today. One of the primary distinctions is that defendants brought before the amended FISA Court would not be guaranteed—because of the need to protect sources—the right to confront all of their accusers. The proposal which includes independent judicial review of remand and conviction decisions alike would enable the government to bring to trial both US and non-US citizens (including those currently held outside of the US who would be brought to the US for trial) to whom certain constitutional privileges (including Miranda) would be extended.
The proposal is mentioned in the following article: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-gitmo17jun17,1,952291.story?coll=la-headlines-nation
A new site has joined the blogosphere. The International Law Reporter, run by Professor Jacob Cogan at University of Cincinnati College of Law. Professor Cogan describes the blog as this:
International Law Reporter is a new blog on scholarship, events, and ideas in international law, international relations, and foreign affairs law.
Looking at the posts thus far it seems to be a definite addition to the RSS reader!
Welcome to the blogosphere International Law Reporter.
