Only the Lower Ranks Get Punished

With indignation, claiming that it threatens their “security tactics,” and with accusations of a “media campaign” to publicly try both governments, Washington and Baghdad are trying to divert attention from the explosive contents of the WikiLeaks classified documents.

The question of political and harmful consequences remains completely under-exposed in the media coverage up to now. The documents expose many war crimes and other severe infringements of the Geneva Convention by the U.S. and sanctioned by Washington. The United States is also responsible for human rights violations during the occupation of Iraq.

In less than five percent of these violations has the U.S. Justice Department taken action. Only a handful of charges have led to prison sentences. The military and political leaders accountable for the violations, up to and including former President Bush and former Vice-President Cheney, have still not been charged.

Such a blatant failure of the national justice system would for other countries — Sudan for example — mean an intervention by the International Court of Justice, to which the U.S. is not a signatory member. The reaction of the U.S. government to the Wikileaks release shows that President Obama is also, and unfortunately, not prepared or able to enforce a new era of civil and human rights after eight dark years of the Bush era.

With that fact, the 1945 Human Rights Charter is further eroded, and after the end of the Cold War, the political and institutional progress that has been achieved in international justice is called into question.

This attitude of the leadership in Western democracies is used by dictators, who have committed even greater atrocities than the U.S. has in Iraq. So the legitimacy of the international arrest warrant against the Sudanese dictator Bashir and the international obligation to extradite him to the International Criminal Court raises further questions.

And it is not only regimes who, because of their atrocities, must fear facing the International Court of Justice, but also independent human rights activists.