Summary from Sunday’s Session of the International Commission of Inquiry on Crimes Against Humanity
Committed by the Bush Administration
by Stanley Rogouski
Sunday’s session (1/22) at Columbia
Law School,
concluding the International Commission of Inquiry on Crimes Against Humanity
Committed by the Bush Administration, featured testimony on reproductive rights
and Hurricane Katrina.
The first of Sunday’s two sections, on Reproductive rights,
opened with Vanessa Brocato of the International Policy Associate, Sexuality
Information and Education Council of the United
States describing the effects of President
Bush’s policy of supporting abstinence only policies for sex education and
family planning in the United States
and abroad.
If Washington DC
were an independent country, she testified, its percentage of HIV positive
individuals would be about the same as that of Mozambique
in sub-Saharan Africa. She went on to describe how
PEPFAR (The President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief) is being funneled into
the Christian Right and ended by taking questions from the jury.
Next, Naina Dhingra testified in detail about the ‘Global
Gag Rule’ or ‘Mexico City Policy,” which was developed under Ronald
Reagan, put on hold by Bill Clinton, and then brought back by George W. Bush.
It prevents, she told the panel, NGOs receiving federal money to provide
information about abortion to people outside the USA,
even with their own money.
Dr. Thomas Fasy of Mt.
Sinai Hospital
in New York, testified on the
Bush administration’s suppression and withholding of medically and
scientifically valid information from patients who urgently need it in a life-threatening
epidemic.
John Garcia of Columbia
University, the prosecutor, stated
that it is an ethical violation to supply misinformation.
Garcia was followed by Dr. Ida Susser who concluded the
session by describing the devastating impact that these policies have on women
and children. Worldwide, Susser testified, some 40 million people are living
with AIDS at the present moment. Twenty million have already died of the
disease, she stated, 7 million of them women and children in Africa.
The Tribunal took a 15-minute break before beginning the
final section, which addressed charges relating to President Bush and his
appointees alleged mishandling of preparations before, and rescue and recovery
operations after, Hurricane Katrina. Individual witnesses and victims
testified. The government’s emergency services response to the devastating
hurricane was described as beyond mere incompetence into the realm of criminal neglect and beyond; to the category
of systematic failures and a conscious
effort to use the hurricane to depopulate the last black, Democratic stronghold
in the south.
Carl Dix of the Revolutionary Communist Party quoted a
Republican Congressman Richard Baker of Louisiana
who reportedly said, “We’ve finally cleaned up public housing in New
Orleans. We couldn’t do it, but God did it.”
Chokwe Lumuumba, a lawyer and human rights activist, was
introduced as a prosecutor. Lumumba told
of a friend in New Orleans who made it out of the city alive, only to break
down later in his hotel room while watching the disrespectful way the media
were characterizing black victims of the disaster as criminals, not as fellow
Americans who need help.
King Downing, National Coordinator of the ACLU’s Campaign
Against Racial Profiling, presented testimony of the federal governments’
neglect of the levy repair around New Orleans.
Downing was followed by Larry McBride, a prisoner in one of New
Orleans’ jails on the day the hurricane struck. He
said guards abandoned the inmates when the jail began to flood. Jurors Ann
Wright broke down emotionally when she heard him describe the horrible
conditions in which the prisoners were left. McBride, far from a hardened
criminal, was serving a thirty-day sentence at the time, for drunk and
disorderly conduct, an offense, it was noted, far from deserving of a death
sentence by drowning.
Emma Lofton Woods, a volunteer with the Red Cross in Mobile
Alabama and also with Common Grounds in New
Orleans, testified about FEMA’s response to the
disaster. She said FEMA was not merely
neglectful or incompetent but that they intentionally withheld aid from city
residents while servicing contractors.
Aaron Guyton of the Common Ground Collective followed Ms.
Woods with similar testimony about FEMA and also the Red Cross. The witnesses
said both organizations seemed to have intentionally withheld food and supplies
from local residents.
Beverly Wright, director for the Deep
South Center for
environmental Justice at Xavier University,
was the final witness. Wright described the federal government as not merely
acting in a neglectful way towards the poor black sections of New
Orleans, but as, by her observation, intentionally
dragging their feet on cleaning up and restoring the middle-class black areas
after the storm. She also suggested that
the motivations were largely political. The Republican Party does not want to
see Democratic strongholds like this rebuilt, she concluded. Wright ended her
testimony with a statement of her own personal determination to stay in the
city and rebuild.