[ 27 September 2002 ] Gentlemen of the Press, Attached is a summary brief of a personal project aimed at enforcing the Geneva Conventions on the Bush administration. I have previously communicated with each of you about the prisoner issues, and I am now preparing to act. I still have a lot to do, but I am now actively seeking legal help, and also getting ready to try it on my own if I have to. I recently prepared a reasonably full summary of the case in order to seek legal representation, and since we never know when a piano might fall on us, the notion dawned on me to start briefing the three of you a bit earlier than originally planned. I'm not seeking public notice at this time: that will change when I am ready to file. On the other hand I feel a growing sense of urgency in light of recent developments, so I'm open to suggestions as well. I've chosen three newspapers for my distribution list, with one journalist from each: Jon Carroll -- Columnist, San Francisco Chronicle jcarroll@sfchronicle.com Tom Jackman -- Writer, Washington Post jackmant@washpost.com Bob Herbert -- Columnist, New York Times bobherb@nytimes.com The Chronicle is my home town paper. I've been reading it since age four or five; and growing up, it was both a teacher and friend to me. The Post and the Times have covered the POW issues in depth from day one, and their reporting has been essential to this effort. Jon Carroll writes a daily column that's been a local institution in the Bay Area for over 20 years now. I'm a regular reader, and I've been writing to Mr. Carroll for a few years now. I've talked to him about the issues that turned into this project from the beginning, so he has a lot of context already. Tom Jackman is reporting on Moussaoui and Hamdi for the Post. His stories on Hamdi have been especially good, exhibiting a keen appreciation for the significant details, and I've shared some of my views with him as well. Bob Herbert needs no introduction, and is included here because of a column he wrote on the prisoner issues that made me wish he'd write 20 more. So my idea of how this should work is simple. I'm asking that you read what I send and handle it according to your own judgment. Each of you has my full respect as journalists: I figure if I do my part well, you and your paper will cover the story just because it's a good story and you're good journalists. If something should happen to me, my ideas, arguments, and research will be in the hands of people I respect, who might yet put the material to good use. If you have any suggestions or comments, feel free. If you do not wish to receive these updates from me, just let me know. Mr. Herbert: I'd appreciate it very much if you'd let Katherine Q. Seelye know about this project. All of you are welcome to share what I send you with your colleagues according to your own professional judgment. BACKGROUND I've been a computer programmer for almost 30 years. Divorced, three grown kids (B-G-B), one grand-son as of 7/18/2002. I am a fourth generation Californian, and a third generation San Franciscan, "born and raised". It happens I've been interested in history, philosophy, and a great many other things for most of my life going back to age nine or so. I began with Homer, and the next year I read Caesar. I began my philosophical studies with Plato and the Tao Te Ching in Jr. High. I began my adult life at 16 as a tournament chess player, rising to an expert rating. Then I switched to playing bridge, eventually reaching the rank of life master. My data processing career began in 1973 at the Bank of America. I am currently unemployed having just been laid off two months ago in a cost-cutting move. As for my political views, well... I am registered Democrat for the duration now, after 15 years of not voting at all on principle. Weirdly enough, I was a Republican before that; conservative on economics and foreign affairs, libertarian and egalitarian on social issues, but I gradually became nauseated by the fundamentalists, the covert racists, and the corporate bandits that have reduced the party of Lincoln to its current degenerate condition. At heart I am a pragmatic anarchist, a humanist, and an internationalist, drawing inspiration from Tom Paine, William Godwin, William Lloyd Garrison, Peter Kropotkin, Leo Tolstoy, and Mohandas K. Gandhi. On 9/11/01 I immediately recognized that the world was facing a crisis on the order of 1939 or 1914 and that the greatest danger by far was the Bush administration, so I made up my mind to take a more active role in the world and do what I little could to help deal with the mess. On 11/13/01 I found out what that was when Bush issued his original military commission order. I made up my mind to track the issues of that order with the idea of finding ways to oppose it. I began researching the Geneva Conventions and a number of other treaties. When Camp X-Ray opened, the administration's policies stopped being just a bad idea and started being violations of the Geneva Conventions, and by then I had become very alarmed by the administration's blustering efforts to simply rewrite the laws as they go. So I turned from the question of what the Geneva Conventions required to the question of how they might be enforced. I began with Nuremburg. I re-examined Quirin. Somewhere in there the original habeas petition, Coalition of Clergy v Bush, was filed in LA. My take on it was that habeas is a convoluted mess of precedents where the government has endless ways of playing games with a case. My thinking was: these are crimes, there should be some way to prosecute them as such. So I surfed to the US code and found 18 USC 2441, the War Crimes Act of 1996. This is a rarity in US law-- a statute that implements an international treaty in the US criminal code. The traditional view is that our laws are perfectly capable of meeting our treaty obligations as is, a manifestation of the native US ambivalence on treaties; but in 1996, the Congress passed the war crimes act to plug any loopholes, against the backdrop of events in Rwanda and Kosovo. So the idea hit me to pursue a criminal case to defend the Geneva conventions by a direct prosecution of the crimes, rather than the by the highly problematic expedient of asserting the prisoner's rights. I converted my news gathering efforts into a criminal investigation-- with the Washington Post and the New York Times providing my field investigators. I began downloading and excerpting every relevant comment from DoD and White House press conferences from 11/13 forward. I started documenting names and dates, fleshing out the details, and researching the legal aspects. In the back of my head, I even started profiling the suspects. * * * I am currently working up a full plain-English brief. The summary brief which is attached to this email will give you fair idea of the thing. I'll be in Texas from Oct. 3rd - 8th. The project is still some months away from being ready to file, but I'll keep you posted when progress occurs. This project is dedicated to the memory of Lile Jacks. Regards, Charles Gittings 770 Kingston Ave. #304 Oakland, CA 94611 510-923-1688 (Home) cbgittings@sbcglobal.net [ attachments: geneva_summary.txt geneva_summary_addendum.txt ]