a rather strange collection of names that includes the former US Treasury official who created the banking sanctions that Iran insists have had no bad effect whatsoever on Iran.
The list also includes Jay Garner, who was named to head the occupation government in Iraq but then fired after only three weeks in Iraq. And it includes two men cited as chiefs of the CIA, although they actually were directors of the FBI. In fact, the list curiously does not include anyone from the CIA.
The list includes four of the seven generals who have served as army chief of staff or vice chief of staff since the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, accusing them of killing and torturing civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq. The list makers appeared unaware that in the American system the army chief and vice chief have no command over troops in the field. They are in charge of recruiting and equipping troops and then turning those troops over to the combatant commanders who actually fight wars. The US chain of command is from the president to the secretary of defense to the combatant commander.
In the case of the Middle East, the combatant commander is the commander-in-chief (CINC) of the Central Command (Cent-com). But the list makers only cited three of the seven Centcom CINCs since 2001; among those ignored was Gen. John Abizaid, who was CINC from 2003 to 2007 when most of the civilian deaths in Iraq transpired.
The list does include all of the US ground force commanders in Iraq, except for Gen. Lloyd Austin, the current commander.
For Afghanistan, the list includes only the current US commander and his predecessor, but ignores all those who served from 2001 to 2009.
Oddly, the list does not include even a single chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The chairman is the highest-ranking officer in the US armed forces and the principal military adviser to the president. All the chairmen of the Joint Chiefs over the last decade have been intimately involved in war policy in the Middle East.
The list includes Gen. James Jones, who was once commandant of the Marine Corps and more recently President Obama’s first national security adviser. He is cited, however, chiefly for endorsing the Mojahedin-e Khalq. The Mojahedin have managed to recruit about a dozen former US government officials to issue endorsements and advocate removing the group from the govern-ment’s list of terrorist organizations. But the Majlis’ batch of names does not cite anyone else for endorsing the Mojahedin.
Perhaps the most interesting name is that of Stuart Levey, who recently retired as the under-secretary of the Treasury. He was cited for “violating human rights in imposing illegal sanctions against the people of Iran.” The regime has spent the last week intensely denying that American sanctions have any impact on Iran, chortling that the sanctions actually show how isolated the United States is, and boasting that the sanctions have actually helped Iran by forcing it to become much more self-sufficient. How Levey violated human rights by doing all those nice things was not explained.
There is one name on the list of human rights violators that many in the west would include, that of Janis Kapinski, who was in charge of many of the prisons in Iraq, including Abu Ghraib.. She was demoted from brigadier general to colonel and dismissed from the Army for dereliction of duty and lying to investigators probing the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuses. Eleven men and women in her command were convicted of crimes at Abu Ghraib—which is more than have ever been convicted of prisoner abuse in the Islamic Republic.
The full list of the 26 Americans cited by the Majlis committee appears in the box to the left..
Kazem Jalali, the spokesman for the Majlis National Security Committee, said the committee voted unanimously Sunday to support the legislation. It is expected to come to the floor shortly for action there.
The text of the legislation as released by the committee imposes two sanctions on the 26 named persons: “1) All the possessions of the individuals named will be confiscated, and 2) These individuals will not be permitted to enter any part of the Islamic Republic of Iran.”
These two sanctions are similar to the standard US sanctions imposed on Iranian officials. The US sanctions order the seizure of any assets belonging to sanctioned persons and found in the United States and bar the issuance of visas to the sanctioned people.
Both the Iranian and American sanctions are little more than token as officials of the countries rarely (if ever) have assets in the other country and aren’t known for vacationing in the other country.
The draft legislation also orders Iran’s public prosecutor to forward the charges against the 26 people to the International Criminal Court in The Hague. The United States has not joined the ICC and the court, therefore, has no jurisdiction over Americans.
Finally, the legislation orders state broadcasting “to use its facilities to inform public opinion and the world of the crimes committed by these individuals.”
The legislation makes no provision for adding any additional names of American human rights violators.