Jennifer Loewenstein is a human rights activist and faculty associate in Middle East Studies at Penn State University. Her academic background is in modern Western European, Jewish, and Middle Eastern History with an emphasis on the latter. Ms. Loewenstein has taught Business English, English as a Second Language, basic Composition and Rhetoric, and grammar since the mid-1980's at Indiana University, The University of Wisconsin-Madison, the Wisconsin English Second Language Institute and Penn State University. She has also taught in the Bourj al-Barajneh Palestinian Refugee camp in Beirut, Lebanon and in Gaza City, Gaza. As a freelance journalist, she has covered Middle East issues from 1996-present and have had numerous articles and essays published on line and in academic journals. She is politically active in Madison, Wisconsin. In an exclusive interview with khamenei.ir, Ms. Jennifer Lowewenstein answers questions on US war crimes, human rights violation and more:
The US may have committed war crimes of torture, cruel treatment and rape, when it interrogates dozens of people in Afghanistan between 2003 and 2014, the International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor said on November the 14th. Is this how US practices “human rights”?
Of course, we may never know exactly what has taken place in Afghanistan because of the secrecy of US actions. Based on what we do know, however, it is clear that we have made conditions in Afghanistan considerably worse than they were before George W. Bush began his ‘Global War on Terror’ in 2001. US ‘policies’ have caused unimaginable trauma to the Afghan people and irreparable damage to the social, political and economic infrastructures in the country. What the Bush regime demanded in 2001 was that the Taliban allow us to extradite Osama Bin Laden to the United States for his alleged mastermind of the 9/11 disaster. The Afghan government asked that we provide proof of Bin Laden’s involvement in the affair before allowing extradition, a reasonable request by any nation seeking due process of international laws. We were unable to provide solid, irrefutable evidence of Bin Laden’s participation or masterminding of these events though we had circumstantial evidence. Afghanistan had the right to refuse our request.
With the possible exception of our client states and allies, such as Israel or the UK, no state that refuses US demands can do so without provoking dire consequences. In the case of Afghanistan, barely one month after 9/11, the United States began bombing Afghanistan on October 8th, 2001. This action was illegal and unjustifiable. It led, predictably, to a humanitarian catastrophe, as international aid organizations correctly warned. More than a million Afghans were internally displaced or turned into refugees at the outset of the attack. The United States has yet to extricate itself from Afghanistan and is unlikely to do so any time soon. We can expect that reparations for the unspeakable damage our actions have caused the Afghan people and the socio-political infrastructure of Afghanistan will never be forthcoming. Reconstruction of the nearly destroyed nation is out of the question. In the contemporary global order, as Bush so eloquently put it, “What we say, goes” —words that summarize US intervention across the world since the end of the Second World War.
In the opinion of this writer, the International Criminal Court’s charges against the United States are understated. Our role in carrying out torture, rape, and other forms of cruel and unusual punishment has been ignored, denied, and silenced by the US mainstream media, by corporate powers and lobby groups, by educators across the country from primary schools up to colleges and universities and, of course, by US military and political officials. Few Americans are aware, for example, of the ‘black hole’ prisons where terror suspects are tortured and sometimes killed. Fewer still know the history of Bagram prison and of its role in the extrajudicial scandal the US participated in by sending its suspects to other countries to do its torture for us. Guantanamo Bay prison is still open, despite the promises of Barack Obama. President-elect, Donald Trump has claimed he will oversee its transformation into a fully functioning prison once again during his term in office.
The United States has no regard for international bodies such as the ICC when it comes to its own crimes. This is unlikely to change as long as the EU and other supranational bodies refuse collectively to challenge its criminal impunity. More importantly, change in US behavior depends, to an overwhelming extent, on global public opinion, in particular from popular pressure and opposition to its actions from within the US itself. The latter point should be underscored.
Our role in honoring fundamental human rights as outlined in the US constitution and Bill of Rights as well as in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights — of which the US is a signatory — is abysmal. The US is the world’s greatest terrorist state and, in global public opinion polls, considered the biggest threat to world peace and security.
This is how the United States ‘honors’ human rights, which it claims to champion, along with “democracy” and “freedom” each time it intervenes in yet another country whose geo-strategic location or natural resources it considers necessary for the maintenance of its power. Our justification remains the old adage that “might makes right.”
Obama recently said we will not apologize for Bombing Hiroshima. Why US officials are so arrogant?
A better question might be why its refusal to apologize for the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki remains as our official policy. Most school children know that America bombed Japan with atomic weapons at the end of the Second World War. What they are commonly told, however, is that this action was necessary to bring the war to a close and that, in the long run, it prevented even more death and destruction than a continuation of war by ‘conventional’ means would have brought. Neither of these reasons are accurate.
First, it was widely expected that Japan was on the brink of surrender prior to the atomic bombings. The Truman administration merely wanted to speed up the end of the war. More appallingly is that we bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in order to test out these new atomic weapons and to demonstrate their power to the Soviet Union, whose status as a superpower threatened our global supremacy. These reasons are rarely taught in our public schools. Neither are the unspeakable human and environmental consequences of these weapons.
Rather than sponsoring an exhibit on the horrors of atomic and nuclear warfare by commemorating Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Smithsonian National Air and Space museum, for example, chose instead to sponsor an exhibit on the Enola Gay, the airplane from which the bombs were dropped, its pilot and the history of atomic science in the US. Such exhibits have been put on display at other museums and institutions across the country as well.
The United States will not apologize for its crimes against the people of Japan because it would suggest that what we did was immoral and wrong. By extension, an admission of guilt might also suggest US weakness in the eyes of other nations, something our politicians and others refuse to do.
Japan is now an ally of the United States. Nevertheless I have often wondered why there is not a greater outcry from its citizens for an apology — or whether such an outcry has simply been obscured or omitted by those who exercise the most control over information in American society.
There are several reports of US military forces targeting and killing civilians in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen etc.; they then simply say "excuse us. This was a mistake." And sometimes, they do not even apologize. What’s your take on that?
Sometimes US leaders refuse even to acknowledge their crimes instead placing the blame on other parties. According to some veterans of the war in Afghanistan, US news reports often minimize or lie outright about the number of casualties its attacks have caused.
In a nation that has no qualms about a targeted assassination of its own citizens, it can come as no surprise that it willfully ignores the accepted rules of warfare and the protection of civilians in times of war as outlined in the 1949 Geneva Convention.
It is rare that the US will admit its crimes, preferring to call them “accidents” or failures of communication. Only in extreme, undeniable incidences of outright murder will there even be an investigation of the incidents, such as when a Medecins Sans Frontieres trauma hospital in Kunduz was hit several times during sustained bombing by coalition forces in Afghanistan. On October 3rd, 2015 US airstrikes killed 42 people destroying the hospital. Doctors and patients were among the dead.
In the year since, there have been 77 attacks on medical facilities run and supported by MSF (Doctors Without Borders, as it is known in English) in Syria and Yemen as well. “Hospitals are being continually dragged onto the battlefield and patients and their doctors and nurses are sacrificed in the process,” according to a MSF publication on October 3rd, 2016 —one year after the atrocity was committed. The briefing on the US military’s efforts to conduct an investigation of the matter left MSF dissatisfied. It is calling for an independent and impartial investigation by the International Fact Finding Commission. Responding to the military briefing, Meinie Nicolai - MSF’s President - commented that it “amounts to an admission of an uncontrolled military operation in a densely populated area during which US forces failed to follow the basic laws of war.” She added, “it is incomprehensible that, under the circumstances described by the US, the attack was not called off.” Calling it a grave breach of international humanitarian law, Nicolai went on to say that, “armed groups cannot escape responsibilities on the battlefield simply by ruling out the intent to attack a protected structure such as a hospital.”
The hospital was fully functioning at the time of the airstrikes. The US fact finding mission admitted that no armed combatants were within or firing from the hospital. As is commonly the case in this type of attack, the victims or their families are unable to call the US military to account or to claim compensation for the loss of life and livelihood. This underscores coalition aggression and impunity for actions in which civilians are massacred and facilities rendered unusable. (www.msf.org; 26 April 2016). Similar accounts of such atrocities have occurred in Yemen further devastating the poorest country in the Middle East as it succumbs to a war unleashed by Saudi Arabia in order to force a regime change and supported by the US.
Recently, Syrian and Russian forces have attacked the rebel held area in eastern Aleppo destroying the last remaining medical facility in the area. It seems other powers do not hesitate to promote military and territorial aims at the expense of tens of thousands of civilians. What should be noted however is that our media focuses on crimes such as these leaving out mention of the vast scale of US led or supported atrocities elsewhere in the world. The Gaza Strip comes to mind here as does Iraq, a nation that has been destroyed by a US led military operation and that is on the brink of disintegration.
US accountability is overlooked, gets little attention in the mainstream American media, is justified and whitewashed by official spokespeople whose information is then transferred to a mostly mis-informed American public. Indeed, the heavily indoctrinated and profoundly ignorant strata of educated Americans continue to view the US an exceptional nation incapable of committing war crimes or of engaging in propaganda wars to further its “security” and other perceived national interests.
To admit wrongdoing would be akin to admitting US fallibility in foreign and domestic policies. This is not a practice people in the elite sectors of American society are ready to undertake. One of our few consolations is that, like Israel, the US has become a pariah state hated, resented, and targeted by various groups of people around the world for the destruction it has wrought against humanity and the very planet on which human society is able to exist.
Afghanistan was high on the list of Barack Obama’s foreign policy to end the foreign interventions of US government. Can you describe Obama’s legacy for the people of Afghanistan? How has US supported terrorist groups in Afghanistan?
Publicly Obama committed himself to ending US foreign intervention in Afghanistan. Privately, however, he must have realized that the primary changes would be cosmetic. They would manifest themselves in the type of intervention or occupation the US would hold over the state. More troops may have returned home, but private corporations, including private security firms, are still active in Afghanistan and more ‘backroom politicking’ is taking place.
Americans are largely unaware of the extent of US special operations forces in the countries we have invaded and occupied or that we consider threatening to our control over important regions of the world such as the Middle East. Obama’s legacy in Afghanistan will be remembered as having further destroyed its cultures and society. His use of drone warfare has surpassed anything the Bush administration sanctioned and celebratory atmosphere surrounding the murder of Osama Bin Laden will count as one of the more horrific actions undertaken under Obama’s rule — not because Bin Laden was innocent or above justice (that is hardly the case) but because the publicly celebrated murder of a ‘Terrorist leader’ will lead to still more instances of ‘taking out’ people we believe threaten ‘our way of life’. Crimes of aggression, the supreme war crime, will become celebrated as practices such as those guaranteed under the US constitution are stripped of their relevance.
The principles considered most essential to the stable, just and rational operations of democratic societies, principles such as innocent until proven guilty; the right to a free and fair trial; the right to due process of the law; freedom of speech and assembly, among others, could gradually be replaced by new-age mercantilist “merchant and manufacturer” multinational corporate units owned and operated by an elite few organized to keep the poor and least valued groups of people languishing in their proper place, and to silence and discredit those who try to oppose it.
It is difficult, though not impossible, to imagine what lies ahead for Afghanistan and other ‘important’ countries in which we have ‘interests’. What appears most certain to me is that our actions will change both the national and international arenas for the worse before they ever begin to get better — if they do so before our planet is destroyed.
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