Posts Tagged ‘John Yoo’
Banned by Moscow, and Proud of It
Some kids dream of winning the World Series, others of going to outer space. I dreamed of being declared persona non grata by Moscow.
Stalin once bestowed that honor on George Kennan, architect of the Cold War doctrine of containment. Last week, Russian President Vladimir Putin made this conservative’s dream come true.
On April 13, Russia banned 18 Americans from entering the country. The lucky few include a federal judge, prosecutors and law-enforcement agents, former Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, commanders of the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. And me—apparently for my Justice Department work in approving interrogation and detention policies after the 9/11 attacks.
According to Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov, the blacklist punishes “people actually responsible for the legalization of torture and indefinite detention of prisoners in Guantanamo, for arrests and unjust sentences for our countrymen.” Happily, I learned the news while at Camp Pendleton for a federal judicial conference. Sitting among thousands of U.S. Marines seemed a good place to contemplate Putin justice.
Russia does not typically scour the world to protest the latest human-rights violations. Moscow announced its travel ban in response to American sanctions on 18 Russian officials involved in the 2009 death of Sergei Magnitsky, a lawyer in Moscow.
Magnitsky had discovered that Interior Ministry officials had used his client, Hermitage Capital, as a front to procure a fraudulent $230 million tax refund. Instead of prosecuting the corrupt officers, Russian police arrested the whistleblower. According to an investigation by the Public Moscow Oversight Commission, jailers tortured and beat Magnitsky and withheld critical medical treatment until he died.
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Can the Magnitsky list live up to its potential?
On Friday, the Treasury Department disclosed the names of 18 Russian officials who will be subjected to asset freezes and visa bans under the Magnitsky Act. Sixteen of these officials were complicit in the prosecution and death of whistle-blowing lawyer Sergei Magnitsky. The remaining two are Chechens; one connected to the death of a critic of Chechnya’s leader Ramzan Kadyrov and the other widely suspected of murdering US journalist Paul Klebnikov. Russia’s retaliation? A list of 18 Americans now banned from Russia that includes AEI’s John Yoo. To this he joked, “Darn, there goes my judo match with Putin.”
In comparison to the 280 Russian human rights violators that Congressman Jim McGovern submitted to the Obama administration earlier this month, the approved list of merely a dozen and a half low- and mid-level Russian bureaucrats disappointed human rights defenders. Yet with any luck, the appearance of two Chechens for reasons unrelated to Magnitsky’s death indicates that the administration is prepared to include additional Russian officials involved in other instances of human rights abuse. This is consistent with both the letter and spirit of the Sergei Magnitsky Act.
That said, although the administration did comply with a congressionally-mandated deadline to release the Magnitsky list by April 13, recent events have served to highlight President Obama’s refusal to publicly condemn the Putin regime for its human rights violations and rapid democratic regression over the last year. Obama didn’t say a word when the Russian authorities canceled their investigation of Magnitsky’s death. And he has remained silent during the ongoing posthumous trial to convict Magnitsky on bogus, politically motivated tax evasion charges. In response to the hundreds of recent NGO raids by the Russian police, German Chancellor Angela Merkel has publicly criticized the Kremlin’s attack on civil society. From Obama, not a peep.
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Putin’s Got a List
They say history repeats itself as farce, but it usually takes longer than this. A day after the U.S. government published its list of Russians banned from travel to the U.S. under the Magnitsky Act, Russia responded Saturday with two lists of its own.
The first is what the Russian Foreign Ministry dubbed the “Guantanamo List.” It bans former Bush Administration Justice Department official John Yoo, former Vice Presidential legal counselor David Addington, retired Major General Geoffrey Miller and Rear Admiral Jeffrey Harbeson from visiting Russia. Moscow accuses them of being “involved in the use and legalization of torture and indefinite detention” of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.
Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney must be wondering what they did to merit exclusion from this honored club. We also like Mr. Yoo’s response, which was to say there goes his judo match with Putin.
Russia’s second list is aimed at those deemed to have infringed the “human rights and freedoms of Russian citizens abroad.” But the Foreign Ministry appears to be concerned with the freedom of only one Russian abroad, convicted arms dealer Viktor Bout.
Bout was sentenced to 25 years in prison last year for conspiring to sell arms to the Colombian narco-Marxists of FARC in order to help them kill Americans. The 14 Americans on Moscow’s second list—including U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara, former U.S. Attorney Michael Garcia and federal District Court Judge Jed Rakoff—have all been involved in prosecuting Bout or his co-conspirators.
This is Mr. Putin’s idea of establishing moral equivalence between U.S. and Russian justice, but no one outside the Kremlin will fall for that. Sergei Magnitsky died in a Russian prison in 2009, at the age of 37, having been jailed for investigating fraud, theft and corruption by Russian officials in their treatment of his client, Hermitage Capital, an investment firm preposterously accused of tax evasion.
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Russia Bans Americans in Tit-for-Tat Reprisal
Russia banned 18 Americans from entering its territory over the weekend, responding to a list published Friday by the Obama administration that barred the same number of Russians from the U.S. for their alleged involvement in the death of a whistle-blowing tax attorney in a Moscow jail.
The diplomatic row heightens discord ahead of a meeting Monday between U.S. National Security Advisor Thomas Donilon and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in Moscow. Relations between the two global powers have grown tense, even as the White House tries to revive a “reset” in hopes of gaining the Kremlin’s support in dealings with North Korea, Syria and Iran.
Russia’s Foreign Ministry divided the list of banned current and former U.S. officials into two categories: four former U.S. officials that it alleges were involved in legalizing or authorizing torture at the Guantanamo Bay detention center and 14 U.S. officials that it alleges were involved in “violating the human rights and freedoms of Russian citizens abroad.”
The Guantanamo Bay list includes two former commanders of the detention center and former Bush Administration officials David Addington and John Yoo. The other list includes U.S. District Judge Jed S. Rakoff, as well as U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Preet Bharara and seven current and former officials from his office. It also includes four Drug Enforcement Administration officials and a Federal Bureau of Investigation agent.
“I have rarely received such an honor,” Mr. Rakoff said in response to a query from The Wall Street Journal on Sunday.
Mr. Yoo, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and former Justice Department official known for writing a series of controversial legal memos on enhanced interrogation techniques, said he has never been to Russia and has no plans to go. “But there goes the Black Sea vacation home for the wife,” he wrote in an email.
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Russia bans 18 Americans from country in answer to US list
Moscow listed 18 Americans who are banned from entering Russia in an announcement Saturday – a tit-for-tat measure that comes a day after Washington imposed similar sanctions. The list, which was released by the Russian Foreign Ministry, includes staffers in the Bush administration and two former commanders of Guantanamo Bay.
On Friday, the US Treasury announced financial sanctions and visa bans on 18 Russian officials, the majority of whom were implicated over the arrest and death of the corruption lawyer Sergei Magnitsky. Magnitsky died in a Russian prison in 2009, after being arrested by the same officers he was investigating over a $230m fraud. He was reportedly beaten and denied medical treatment while behind bars.
The case sparked an outcry in the US and led to the passage of a controversial bill requiring Washington to impose sanctions against those deemed responsible for the Russian whistleblower’s death. The Magnitsky Act, which was signed into law last year, led to immediate counter measures by Moscow, which imposed a ban on US adoption of Russian children.
The Russian and American lists exclude senior figures, but will nonetheless further damage any chance of a “reset” on relations, which President Barack Obama has stated to be his aim.
Among those singled out by Washington for sanction are two police officers, Pavel Karpov and Artyom Kuznetsov, and a former tax official, Olga Stepanova. Magnitsky was arrested after linking the three to a tax fraud scheme. Of the 18 people named by the US Treasury, 16 are connected to the Magnitsky case. The other two were included in relation to the shooting death of a former bodyguard to the Chechen president, Ramzan Kadyrov, and the murder of a journalist, Paul Klebnikov.
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