Yesterday, The technician came to install what was necessary for the phone and internet to work. He arrived exactly at the start of the time window I was given, and I think finished up a little early. So I am actually typing on a windows 10 desktop. I don’t promise to stay on Windows 10 (not, I suppose, that there’s any difference readers could see), but most of my information is now on both computers (technically, on separate portable hard drive of which each has one, and yes, I did that in advance and it took forever,) so I can start transitioning in earnest. Also, I received 2 emails from the Election Department – first that my ballot was received, and the second that it had been counted. Yippee: I can put up that “I voted” sticker now11/
Heather Cox Richardson writes about control of the Senate – why it’s so important, how it is determined, how the 2024 election could affect it, what the Republican Party is doing to influence the election, how events in the 1890’s led to the passage of the 17th Amendment, and why the events of that decade resemble events today.
Recently, I started a subscription to the newsletter of “The F*cking News” whose motto is something like “If you prefer your news delivered with profanity, this is the news for you.” I can take or leave profanity, but I do like the attitudes and world views which lead journalists to use profanity, so I thought I’d give it a go. This report which headlines my first newsletter from them (and also the page to which it links – they are apparently using old print newspapers’ quaint habit of putting multiple unrelated articles on the same page) doesn’t have much profanity but it is chock full of attitude, and presents demonstrable facts from a perspective of the appropriate reaction to them.
Yesterday, I had expected some commentary from Joyce Vance Wednesday night on Jack Smith’s newest filing, which was (somewhat redacted) released then by Judge Chuutkan. But no, she’s taking a couple of days off for Rosh Hashanah (she wishes us all “besorot tovot” (may we hear good news.) She did, however, provide a link to it (it’s down from 180 pages to 168.) No, I didn’t try to read it – I am having an everything everywhere all at once week. But if you want cammentary without going through the whole thing, i’d recommend Harry Litman at Talking Feds on YouTube. He’s detailed, yet speaks colloquially enough for just about anyone to grasp all the points. Also yesterday, Tina Peters was sentenced – to 9 years in prison. The judge had some things to say.
Heather Cox Richardson did address the filing along with the debate – and while it’s longish, it’s nowhere near 168 pages. Also, it makes one thing pellucidly clear which I want to point out, because you will see (maybe already have seen) articles in sources you trust which claim that Trump** said “Make them riot!” That is false. Those words were spoken, but not by Trump**. It was Mike Roman in DEtroit who said that. Richardson provides the circumstances under which it was said.
Everyone here who loves Betty Bowers is going to really love this. Not that she is known for being subtle, but this one really pulls no punches and takes no prisoners.
Yesterday, the radio opera was Verdi’s “Un Ballo in Maschera.” It’s loosely based on an actual assassination which happened in Sweden in 1792. As with “Rigoletto,” an opera about the assassination of a monarch put Verdi at odds with the censors. So early performances of it were set in America (Boston IIRC), prior to the Revolution, which is not as far fetched as I used to think – Sweden (under Gustav III) was the first country not directly involved in the fighting to diplomatically recognize the US. But I digress. The assassination really happened, but I will not vouch for all the hoo-hah surrounding it in the opera – the fortuneteller predicting that the first man who shakes the king’s hand will kill him, the king being in love with his prime minister’s (who is also his best friend) wife, she silently returning his love but wanting nothing more than to be freed of her obsession, the meeting in the graveyard at midnight, The Prime Minister showing up not knowing that the woman with the king is his own wife, the king’s orders to escort her without learning her name, the couple stopped by the potential assassins, the wife revealing her identity only so they won’t kill her husband, the husband refusing to believe she is faithful and switching sides to help the assassins – all that is just too fortuitous. And that’s not even mentioning the page boy (a “trouser role”) who would be adorable if the plot as a whole was not so weighed down with inevitability – and the final irony of the king’s last act being to write out orders of transfer for the Prime Minister so that the king and the wife will be at least physically removed from temptation.
Nameless, was it you who commented on a Biden ad about NATO that they should have included Reagan? Whether or not, I’m happy to report that VoteVets took care of that.
This from Talking Points Memo is a deep dive into Chesebro and his involvement. If it bores you, I’m sorry – it can be helpful sometimes to get details – easier to speculate how the jury (or the judge in a bench trial) will decide.
Experts in autocracies have pointed out that it is, unfortunately, easy to slip into normalizing the tyrant, hence it is important to hang on to outrage. These incidents which seem to call for the efforts of the Greek Furies (Erinyes) to come and deal with them will, I hope, help with that. As a reminder, though no one really knows how many there were supposed to be, the three names we have are Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone. These roughly translate as “unceasing,” “grudging,” and “vengeful destruction.”
War crimes. We know them when we see them. Or do we? Speaking as an aficionsdo of detective stires – the kind where you try to figure out who did it before the author tells you – when starting out to solve a simple crime (one victim, one criminal) you look for a break in the pattern. I think I can say without fear of contradiction that in a war zone, there are no patterns – certainly no patterns strong enought to look for a break in them. The author of today’s article is a war crime forensic investigator, who can tell you exactly what kind of evidence he looks for, and how convincing it has to be before a case can be made.
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Proving war crimes isn’t simple – a forensics expert explains what’s involved with documenting human rights violations during conflicts, from Afghanistan to Ukraine
The United Nations reports that at least 5,237 Ukrainian civilians have been killed in the Ukraine war – but other estimates place this figure at more than 10,000.
Ukraine, meanwhile, has started more than 16,000 investigations into suspected war crimes committed by Russians.
For me and my colleagues – who since 1998 have worked in securing forensic evidence of these types of crimes in Afghanistan, Guatemala and other places – it is apparent that identifying and collecting evidence of international crimes like killing civilians during conflict is beyond the capabilities and resources of local police crime scene teams, criminal investigators and prosecutors.
This means that in the case of the Ukraine war, a new, unbiased judiciary and investigatory organization will likely need to be set up to handle the claims and questions about tens of thousands of victims on all sides. This will take decades of work and cost a large amount of money, requiring the support of rich countries.
A mass grave in Dasht-e-Leili, Afghanistan, was investigated by Physicians for Human Rights experts, including the author, in 2002 and 2008. Stefan Schmitt/Physicians for Human Rights
Proving war crimes
War crimes, under international law, happen when civilians, prisoners of war, hospitals or schools – essentially anyone and anything that isn’t involved in military activities – are targeted during a conflict.
These prosecutions raise questions about how evidence is collected and handled to support these cases – and about credibility. Ukraine has a history of government corruption, and Donetsk is both not recognized internationally and is backed by Russia, which has a judicial system known to tolerate torture.
Previous recent conflicts that resulted in war crime allegations and investigations offer context for understanding the challenges in independently investigating them.
I investigate cases in which law enforcement, military and police are alleged to have committed crimes against civilians and are not held accountable for it. In many cases, these alleged crimes happen during a civil war, like the Guatemalan civil war in the late 1970s and early 1980s, or the Rwandan conflict and genocide in the mid-1990s.
This means that I often work with international organizations like the United Nations to travel to these places and document physical evidence of war crimes – take photographs, take notes, do measurements and draw sketches to illustrate a potential crime scene. The idea is that any other experts can pick up this evidence and reach their own conclusions about what happened there.
Crime scene investigators like me generally do not determine whether a war crime was committed. That is a decision reserved for the prosecutor or a judge who is given the evidence.
Shortly after the U.S. invaded Afghanistan in 2001, about 2,000 Taliban fighters surrendered to the Northern Alliance, an Afghan military coalition allied with the U.S. They later went missing.
An investigation determined that these prisoners might have suffocated or were killed in containers used to transport them. It was suspected that they were buried in a mass grave in Dasht-e-Leili, a desert area in northern Afghanistan.
In 2002, the United Nations invited a group of forensics experts from the nonprofit group Physicians for Human Rights to investigate this alleged mass grave. As part of this team, I documented heavy equipment tracks, human remains and personal items in this area.
Physicians for Human Rights exposed over a dozen bodies in a test trench, and autopsies by one of their forensic pathologists determined the cause of death was consistent with suffocation. Evidence of medical gloves on the surface of and inside the mass grave struck me as unusual, as it indicated that logistically prepared personnel had handled the remains of the dead. At the time, Afghans barely had any medical supplies to take care of their injured.
To me, it was indicative of the presence of foreign troops with the necessary supplies – such as medical gloves – at this site when the bodies were buried there. Considering that in late November 2001 the U.S. and its allies were searching for al-Qaida members, this might be a reasonable explanation for their presence.
In 2008, in a follow-up visit to the area, I discovered two large pits in the desert, indicative of the removal of any human remains that might have been buried there. Later analysis of satellite imagery provided evidence of a large-scale excavation using a backhoe and trucks, dating it to late 2006.
Everyone from former Afghan Vice President Rashid Dostum, also a warlord, to U.S. military and government experts offered different answers as to what happened there.
Since Ukraine is fighting Russia in an active war, it will not have the independence required to fairly investigate and prosecute potential war crimes cases.
That will require other countries and international groups to help set up an independent, unbiased organization to investigate the fate of victims on all sides of the war.
In March, the human rights branch of the United Nations also launched an international commission to investigate human rights violations in Ukraine. But the U.N. does not identify and return human remains to their families.
While the International Criminal Court is also investigating war crimes in Ukraine, this organization tends to focus on high-level cases that go after political leaders and is not tasked to provide answers to families of all victims.
These investigations will not extend beyond justice – meaning the arrest and prosecution of soldiers or political leaders.
War crimes involving massive numbers of casualties leave behind a multitude of surviving family members, all of whom have the right to know the fate of their loved ones. This goes for Ukraine as well as any other country where international crimes are committed.
Families also have the right to the truth about what happened. This requires an institution with the independence, staff, scientific resources, legal capabilities and money to reach this understanding.
============================================================== Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone, the events used as an example here happened during the Bush administration. As suggestive as the findings were, they were not sufficiently evidential to make a case, let alone press charges. So anyone who is still wondering why Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld were never charged with war crimes can look here for at least partial answers.
It would be nice if war criminals – at least the most egregious – could always be brought to justice – but for more than a thousand years it has been a principle of justice that it is better for multiple guilty people to go free than for one innocent to suffer, and the rules of evidence have been written accodingly (the exact ratio, of course, has varied over the years. In Anglo-Saxon England it was four to one. The “Blackstone ratio,” determined at about the time of the Founding Fathers, is ten to one. Some have proposed as high as a thousand to one, and some as low as one to one.) Even if we don’t agree about the number, I think we mostly agree in principle. Even when we don’t like individual results (for example, it appears that the Matt Gaetz human trafficking case has an evidence problem – specifically a witness credibility problem.)
