It doesn't happen often, but sometimes, something you read is so magnificent on its own that there is nothing to say about it. This USA Today article, proudly touting the increased efforts of the U.S. Government to track down and punish war criminals (provided, of course, that they're not American), is one such example:
War criminals find it's harder to hide from past, U.S. agents
When federal agents finally caught up with Gilberto Jordan, he had all the trappings of a solid American life: a house in a tidy South Florida neighborhood, steady work as a chef and a spotless record as a law-abiding citizen since emigrating from Guatemala in the early 1990s.
Nothing suggested he was hiding from a horrific past that the agents attributed to him when they knocked on his door that day in May. He still used the same name that appeared on a decade-old order for his arrest on murder charges in his native country. . . .
The prosecution of Jordan, 54, underscores a new push by federal law enforcement agencies to hunt down war criminals and human rights abusers who have found refuge in the United States.
The targets range from African despots and military officers from the former Yugoslavia to lesser-known figures, such as Jordan. It's unclear how many are out there, but officials at Justice's Human Rights and Special Prosecutions office say they're tracking multiple suspects. Armed with new investigative tools, more legal powers and a beefed-up congressional mandate, they're charging culprits at an unprecedented rate.
The agents that tracked him are from a special center that Immigration and Customs created last year to bolster its work on such cases.
When Jordan pleaded guilty this summer to participating in the [1982] Dos Erres massacre, it marked the first conviction won by a new, 50-person Justice Department office set up to prosecute them.
"I don't think there's any question that we're going to have a greater number of these cases and that these cases are going to reach (suspects from) more parts of the world," says Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer, a child of Holocaust survivors who has pushed the more aggressive efforts to hold war criminals accountable. "It's something we have to do. We owe it to our citizens and we owe it to the world."
"We want to send a message to would-be human rights violators of the future," Rosenbaum says. "Their odds of getting away with it are shrinking rapidly."
I love that Lanny Breuer quote so much that I just need to repeat it: "It's something we have to do. We owe it to our citizens and we owe it to the world." And that Rosenbaum quote seems grounded in the premise that -- imagine this -- war crimes become more likely in the future, become virtually inevitable, if "would-be human rights violators" know they can "get away with it." This, from a country that actually placed as a Judge on its second-highest federal court level one of the prime legal architects of its worldwide torture regime, and which blithely leaves him there even as more evidence emerges of the central role he played in enabling it, and whose top political leader formally adopts a position of full immunity for its own war criminals. My duties as a citizen compel me to help this new, muscular DOJ War Crimes unit by pointing to one place where they haven't yet looked.
Read more at www.salon.com
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