" ... government actors could be prosecuted abroad if powerful Western states can establish the perception that they committed a crime, even if no such acts were previously proven. Under the new doctrine, the West’s designated enemies are guilty until proven innocent."
Ironically, President Donald Trump was himself the target of this Kafkaesque type of lawfare and rails against what was done to him. (See Sputnik's 6/19 interview with Charles Ortel about investigations of 'Spygate.') Yet he sees nothing strange about its use against Syria's president and one assumes against anyone else on America's hit list.
June 19, 2019
The Grayzone
Mainstream reporting on Syria has relied heavily on the work of the Commission for International Justice and Accountability (CIJA), a Western government-funded regime change group whose investigators collaborated with al-Qaeda and its extremist allies to drum up prosecutions of Syrian officials
Western corporate media reporting on the war in Syria has relied extensively on partisan and dubious research produced by a cottage industry of opposition-linked groups posing as neutral monitors.
In part one of this investigation, we explored one the key cogs in this disinformation machine: the Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR), a foreign government-funded, pro-military intervention opposition front group.
In this installment, we will probe a group that has not only helped shaped Western media reporting on Syria, but which is at the forefront of an emerging strategy to bleed the Syrian government even as the war comes to a close. It is called the Commission for International Justice and Accountability, or CIJA.
CIJA is often presented as an “independent” legal group committed to dispensing justice for war crimes. Its work has been the subject of glowing profiles in The New York Times, NBC News, The Guardian, and The New Yorker.
A shocking report in May on “Syria’s secret torture prisons,” by the New York Times’ former Beirut bureau chief Anne Barnard, was based heavily on documents and research provided by CIJA. Barnard described the organization simply as a “nonprofit,” with no further information.
In reality, CIJA is bankrolled by the very same Western governments that have fueled the proxy war against Syria, and was founded to supplement the regime-change operation that those states initiated in 2011.
CIJA’s investigators in Syria collaborated with and even paid foreign-backed Salafi-jihadist militias – including members of the al-Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra – to steal files from Syrian government buildings in areas that had been taken over by armed militants. These stolen documents are what lawyers hope to use in prosecutions of Syrian officials.
Indeed, top corporate media outlets like The New York Times have published major reports based on leaked Syrian government documents without disclosing the fact that these files were first stolen by Syrian al-Qaeda militants, and then handed over to a Western government-funded group committed to regime change.
Were this chain of custody publicized more widely, it would immediately call into question the reliability and veracity of the news reports that have relied on this group, and might even set off an international scandal.
But leading outlets have ignored CIJA’s methods of acquisition, depicting the group almost without exception as an impartial NGO whose leadership consists of noble humanitarians. A closer look shows the seamy side this organization.
CIJA’s executive director operates a for-profit consulting firm that has raked in lucrative contracts in conflict zones, including through CIJA’s work in Syria, while advising mining companies in Africa. And the commission’s deputy director openly touts their work with the US Department of Homeland Security and FBI on border security.
CIJA is also closely advised by a former State Department lawyer who has helped oversee the so-called “Caesar file,” a deceptive operation aimed at proving the Syrian government guilty of mass extermination, but which involved further collaboration with extremist militias in Syria as well as extensive funding from Qatar.
As the following investigation by The Grayzone will show, the Commission for International Justice and Accountability is anything but an independent group committed to human rights above all else.
‘Transitional justice,’ the latest tool in the regime-change toolbox
The Syrian opposition and its supporters abroad have spent the past eight years doing everything in their power to lobby the United States to launch a direct military intervention to topple the government of President Bashar al-Assad. They have deployed red lines, White Helmets, and a constant stream of white lies to argue that the US military has a “responsibility to protect” Syrians from their government.
Despite billions of dollars poured into a cataclysmic proxy war, this monumental effort failed: Syria has largely been stabilized, and refugees are slowly trickling back in. In frustration, a motley crew of veteran regime-change warriors and lawyers are resorting to a new and largely untested strategy.
Their efforts amount to legal warfare, or lawfare, and the Commission for International Justice and Accountability is a key player in the new campaign.
Some describe the latest weapon in the West’s regime-change toolbox as “transitional justice.” To others, it is referred to as the “Responsibility to Prosecute,” a play on the “Responsibility to Protect” doctrine, or R2P, that was applied with varying degrees of catastrophe by liberal interventionists in theaters from the former Yugoslavia to Libya.
Proponents of the experimental legal approach freely acknowledge that it involves the subversion of international law. As conceded by Oona Hathaway, a former counsel in the Defense Department and advocate of the newfangled legal tactic, “The need to prove that offenses have been previously ‘criminalized’ has produced inconsistent results and uncertainty about the corpus of war crimes.”
In other words, government actors could be prosecuted abroad if powerful Western states can establish the perception that they committed a crime, even if no such acts were previously proven. Under the new doctrine, the West’s designated enemies are guilty until proven innocent.
The “Responsibility to Prosecute” was conceived to address another obstacle in prosecuting Syrian officials: Neither the United States nor Syria is a state party to the Rome Statute which established the International Criminal Court (ICC). Today, the US government treats the ICC as a hostile institution, denying visas to its officials for investigating American war crimes in Afghanistan.
Under the novel doctrine, Washington could have its cake and eat it too, referring war crimes prosecutions of official enemies to friendly countries like Germany that accept universal jurisdiction without having to interact with the ICC.
“Domestic jurisdictions may in many cases be better placed to afford a measure of accountability, particularly in the context of Syria, and this approach allows them to do so for war crimes not reflected in those [Rome] statutes,” argued Hathaway, the former Pentagon lawyer.
Tim Hayward, a professor of environmental political theory at the University of Edinburgh and member of the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media, is one of the few observers of the Syrian conflict to have cast a critical eye on the “Responsibility to Prosecute” campaign.
“There is a discernible aim here of redefining the rules of the ‘rules-based international order’, with particular relevance to who shall be permitted to govern a country,” Hayward explained. “This is to press for global rules that override the powers of nation-states – a development whose effects are akin to what is already being accomplished through trade and investment agreements like TTP and TTIP by imposing rules of corporate globalism on nations with compliant governments.”
Hayward concluded, “from the standpoint of concern to serve US-based corporate interests, there is more at stake than the matter of who should be president of Syria.”
Possible targets of this new legal tactic lie well beyond Damascus, and in any nation judged to be excessively recalcitrant. Fernando Cutz, a former National Security Council advisor to Donald Trump who played a central role in devising the coup attempt that has failed to remove Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, took to the New York Times op-ed section this June to recommend prosecutions in hybrid courts as a means “to bring down Maduro.”
Citing as precedent a series of unproven allegations and US sanctions measures applied against the Venezuelan government, Cutz argued that members of Maduro’s inner circle should be tried in Latin American countries that have signed on to the Rome Statute, thus enabling the US to remain outside the jurisdiction of the ICC.
But the strategy for applying the “Responsibility to Prosecute” against Syria’s government is far more developed than the one targeting Venezuela’s.
And the Commission for International Justice and Accountability (CIJA) is hoping to pave the way for this novel form of lawfare.
Back in 2014, at the height of the Syrian proxy war, CIJA spokesperson Nerma Jalacic made the group’s intentions clear, boasting, “No organization other than the CIJA is in fact building prosecution-ready case files with evidence pointing to the criminal liability of high and highest ranking individuals within the [Syrian] regime.”
In an article for a legal website in March, researcher Melinda Rankin revealed that CIJA is the main non-governmental entity working with Germany to “fill the gap” in the absence of an ICC commission targeting the Syrian government.
Funded by the same Western governments that armed the ‘moderate rebels’
In its major May 11 report on “Syria’s secret torture prisons,” The New York Times noted that “there is a growing movement to seek justice through European courts” against top Syrian government officials. Reporter Anne Barnard, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, noted that French and German prosecutors had issued arrest warrants against two top security ministers in the Syrian government, and had begun proceedings against several others.
What Barnard omitted, however, was that the sources that informed her article have been at the forefront of the legal campaign against the Syrian government, and have been supported with millions from the same Western and Gulf states that fueled an Islamist insurgency inside the country.
Barnard’s investigation relied almost entirely on two groups: the Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR), the Qatari-based opposition front group exposed in part one of this investigation; and the Commission for International Justice and Accountability (CIJA).
Barnard identified CIJA simply as a “nonprofit,” providing no further context on its background or political agenda.
Similarly, in a glowing profile of CIJA in the New Yorker, writer Ben Taub referred to the group simply as “an independent investigative body.”
But while CIJA may claim to be a non-governmental organization, it relies on governments for its funding. In a 2018 interview with a US government agency, CIJA’s director of investigations and operations said the group’s “current donors include the United Kingdom, Canada, the European Union, Germany, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Norway” — all countries that supported the opposition in one form or another in its war on the Syrian government.
These funding sources are far from hidden. The European Commission publicly lists CIJA as an “EU-funded project.” The European Union has allotted €1.5 million to the organization for work in the Syrian Arab Republic from 2016 to 2020.
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There is much more in the report.
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