Obama and Human Rights Violations: See No Evil?
Last week The Cable reported that
For the past two years, the U.S. State Department has channeled a total of $1 million in funds to the Commission for International Justice and Accountability (CIJA), a group of international war crimes prosecutors that sends local researchers, lawyers, and law students into Syrian battle zones to collect and extract files and other evidence that can help map the Syrian command structure and identify the military orders authorizing illegal activities, including barrel bomb campaigns, the starvation of besieged towns, and a spate of mass murders that have pushed the conflict’s death toll past 190,000 since March 2011.
Why? No explanation was given, and apparently there was an argument within the administration: the Commission spokesman “hinted that the State Department’s ambassador-at-large for war crimes issues, Stephen Rapp, had not supported the decision. ’Ambassador Rapp and his team have been highly supportive of our work but they do not control the funding,’ she said.”
But the goal that will instantly occur to many people, including me, is that the administration no longer wants to pursue war crimes trials against Assad and his regime. Instead, we may be seeking accommodation with him--and an accommodation about Syria with Assad’s sponsor, which is Iran. Last week Mr. Obama wrote his fourth letter to Iran’s “Supreme Leader.” The Wall Street Journal reports that:
Mr. Obama’s letter also sought to assuage Iran’s concerns about the future of its close ally, President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, according to another person briefed on the letter. It states that the U.S.’s military operations inside Syria aren’t targeted at Mr. Assad or his security forces.
Once upon a time Obama said “Assad must go,” but that is no longer policy--nor do we want to learn more about his war crimes.
Sadly, there is a direct and exact precedent for this move by the Obama administration: in 2009 it cut off funding for groups that were examining Iran’s own crimes. The Boston Globe broke that story in October 2009: