editorial

Apologies avoided, inferences justified

It's ancient history that's best forgotten, the party faithful will plead.

Yes, the president's father's men snatched labor activist Heliodoro Portugal from the Coca-Cola Cafe in Santa Ana in May of 1970, and after an ordeal that witnesses say included torture, Portugal died in clandestine captivity sometime in late 1971 and was secret buried under the parking lot of an army barracks in Tocumen. The body was not found until 1999, and thereafter the notorious pro-corruption former Attorney General José Antonio Sossa and string of other despicable governmental authorities did their best to destroy evidence, deny what happened and insult the family.

It's not ancient history, it's an outstanding judgment of the Inter-American Human Rights Court, whose judgments Panama is bound by international law to respect. The Panamanian government was ordered to pay damages to the Portugal family and to apologize for what was done.

But President Torrijos very intentionally submitted a national budget for 2009 to his rubber stamp legislature which had no money to pay this judgment. And now President Torrijos has sent one of his totalitarian Norieguista apparatchiki, Minister of Government and Justice Dilio Arcia, to conduct an obscene ceremony in which there was no apology and no admission of what was done to Heliodoro Portugal.

So will the president's party distance itself from this grotesque display in time for the May election? That's quite unlikely.

You see, the PRD includes somewhere around 30 percent of Panama's voters, and the vast majority of these people had no hand whatsoever in the murders, disappearances and wholesale looting of the public trust that characterized the dictatorship. However, the party's standard bearer, Balbina Herrera, can't say the same.

Let the record show that as the Noriega dictatorship's mayor of San Miguelito, Balbina was also one of the principal leaders of that community's Dignity Battalions, the Norieguista goon squad. Let the record show that in her capacity as mayor of San Miguelito and as a Dignity Battalions leader, Balbina infamously declared: "Civilista visto, Civilista muerto" --- "Civilista seen, Civilista dead." Let the record show that acting out on this incitement by their leader, the San Migulito Dignity Battalions attacked a nonviolent anti-dictatorship protest and killed rank-and-file Civilista activist Alexis Baulés.

Panama still awaits any acknowledgment of any sort, not even to speak of an apology for, this crime by the PRD candidate for president. Given those circumstances, all of the ugly inferences that can reasonably be drawn are justified.

Sorting out the US torture mess

Now Washington faces a dilemma. Some of the prisoners held at Guantanamo and other locations are very likely guilty of terrible crimes, probably including participation in the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States. The evidence that George W. Bush had intended to used against them, however, was largely based on confessions extracted through the use of torture or the threat of torture.

Such "evidence" is unreliable, it's unethical for any lawyer to urge its acceptance or any judge to accept it, and any further proofs obtained on the basis of data collected by torture is the inadmissible "fruit of a poisoned tree" under US law. So, properly excluding all that product of criminal activity, is there enough good evidence to bring a suspect to trial?

It may be that some of Osama's boys who should be tried and punished for grave crimes against humanity can't be, due to the crimes against humanity of the Bush administration. That should not mean, however, that anyone reasonably identified as an al Qaeda member should just be allowed to walk away. This organization is at war with the United States by its own declaration and by reciprocal US actions, and when you catch a member of a hostile force in time of war that person may be held as a prisoner of war until the conflict's conclusion and even longer if a criminal charge against the individual can be proven.

There are various controversies about who is protected by the Geneva Conventions with respect to prisoners of war. Better to set aside arguments that guerrillas aren't soldiers and are therefore unprotected "illegal combatants." It's really not a useful distinction. It's better to say that all the captured combatants of the opposing belligerent force are prisoners of war and treated as such, while reserving the right to try and punish those who concealed their membership in the opposing force or fought under a false flag or terrorized civilians as war criminals for doing those things.

Al Qaeda guys --- real ones, and not innocent people sold to US or allied authorities by dubious informants with obnoxious ulterior motives --- should not walk away from US custody so long as Osama bin Laden remains at large or the jihadi movement he has inspired maintains combatants in the field. They should be held in POW camps, unless duly convicted with proper evidence of specific crimes, in which case they should be treated as criminals.

That still leaves Washington with another huge torture dilemma, the investigation, apprehension, trial and punishment of those in or hired by the US government who besmirched America's reputation by ordering, carrying out or otherwise participating in torture.

The Lyndie England and Charles Graner cases for their parts in the Abu Ghraib torture scandal are flawed but still useful benchmarks for what ought to be done.

Graner got 10 years in prison and that's arguably a reasonable sentence for what he did. However, at his trial he was denied the right to fully present the facts about how he had been ordered to do what he did as a defense. Following orders is not a complete defense, but it's a mitigating circumstance that should have been taken into account. Graner's conviction and sentence were thus the result of a flawed trial and erroneous decision and should be overturned. The case should be remanded for a new trial. And while he should be subject to retrial that might get the 10-year rap reimposed, prosecutors ought to listen to Graner's story of orders from above, and they may want to offer him immunity or leniency in exchange for his testimony against superiors.

If following criminal orders is a mitigating circumstance, giving criminal orders is an aggravating circumstance. The people who are responsible for the Bush administration's torture policy should be brought to justice, with the investigation starting with those who carried out the torture and working inexorably up to those who ordered it. If the man who was convicted of carrying it out got 10 years, the architects of the torture policy should be identified, tried, and punished with substantially more severe sentences than Graner received.