Grenada: an Invasion Revisited

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Date: Wed, 7 Mar 2007 16:32:13 -0500 (EST)
From: nytr@olm.blythe-systems.com
Subject: [NYTr] Grenada: an Invasion Revisited
To: nytr@olm.blythe-systems.com (NY Transfer List)

sent by Tim Murphy

Counterpunch - Feb 27, 2007
http://www.counterpunch.org/oshaughnessy02272007.html

Grenada: an Invasion Revisited

British Law Lords Denounce Kangaroo Trial
and Sentences of Grenada Putschists

By HUGH O'SHAUGHNESSY

One of the fetid messes which Ronald Reagan left on the Caribbean island of
Grenada after his invasion of it in 1983 has been smelling increasingly vile
over the last few decades. It has just resurfaced in London.

Older readers will remember that the government of prime minister Maurice
Bishop was overthrown in a mini-putsch mounted by Bishop's rival Bernard
Coard in which Bishop and his closest supporters were massacred. Thereupon
Reagan, seizing an opportunity offered by the deluded putschists, ordered a
massive invasion of the tiny island alleging, inaccurately, that lives of US
students on the island were at risk. Of course, no US lives were ever at
risk. Of course the appeal for help to the US which was purportedly issued
by Queen Elizabeth II's representative on Grenada, Governor-General Sir Paul
Scoon, which the Reaganites waved as the legal justification for the
invasion was a fraudulent invention. It had been manufactured after the US
troops had landed. Reagan had about as much genuine justification for
invading Grenada as George Bush had for invading in Iraq.

On February 7 this year five members of the judicial committee of the Privy
Council - otherwise known as "law lords" - who for historical reasons form
the supreme court of the tiny former British colony now an independent
mini-monarchy, gave their view of some of the elements of the legal charade
which followed the invasion. They allowed the appeal of Coard and twelve
others against their imprisonment on charges of murdering Bishop and his
companions and declared that they had irregularly been in jail for almost a
quarter of a century.

All thirteen doubtless had a hand in the murder on 19 October 1983 of Bishop
and his closest colleagues. No one in his or her right mind thinks that
Bernard Coard and his associates have clean hands. That is not the point.
The point is that after the Ronald Reagan's illegal invasion which was
roundly condemned by the UN General Assembly and even by his close ally
Margaret Thatcher, the men were detained unlawfully, put in front of a court
of doubtful legality and kept under lock and key against the most elementary
rules of the Grenadian constitution. In their judgement a few days ago the
five law lords--some of whom were active in the cause of justice in Chile
after the detention of the murderer Augusto Pinochet following his arrest in
London in 1998--found unequivocally that the thirteen appellants "remain
held in detention without lawful authority" and that "the appellants'
present detention is solely by the authority of the executive". They added
that their case should after all this time be put back to the Supreme Court
of Grenada for proper sentencing. In plain English the highest legal
authority is saying the appellants never enjoyed due process.

In late October 1983, Coard and his group were arrested and detained by US
forces, held incommunicado on US naval vessels and subjected to lengthy
interrogation ` la Guantanamo. Their whereabouts were kept secret and
requests from lawyers, family members and others to meet them were rejected.
They were held by the US for periods of nine to twelve days before
eventually being turned over the following month to the authorities at
Richmond Hill Prison. The incommunicado detention of these people violated
both the constitutional law of Grenada and international human rights law.

They reported they had been tortured. Amnesty says that they were subjected
to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment being held in wooden crates, fully
exposed to the sun and without facilities for water or personal hygiene.
Bernard Coard was allegedly held for a total of nine days in steel cages in
the holds of two US naval vessels. The cages were placed very near the
engine rooms of the ships where the noise was deafening.

Two years after their detention, the 13 with several others were finally
brought in front of an unconstitutional tribunal, termed a court of
necessity --shadows of the military tribunals fashioned to deal with the
detainees in Guantanamo Bay. It was operating under the minute-by-minute
control of, and indeed paid for by, the US government. It was no surprise
therefore that among its many other deficiencies the method it adopted to
choose the twelve jurors for the case was fraudulent. The job of choosing
them, for instance, was taken away from the usual officer, the Registrar. A
lawyer for the prosecution, Denise Campbell, was given the job of selecting
the twelve from a group of citizens who saw nothing wrong in jeering and
booing and proclaiming noisily in court that the accused would soon be
hanged. When Campbell finished the selection process, the Registrar was
given back the job which had temporarily been taken from him. The expressed
wishes of the jurors were realised and they were sentenced to death, later
commuted to life imprisonment. The judgement was delivered orally. A written
document was not forthcoming since the ill-paid judges wouldn't provide one
except for a sum of money--rumoured to be up to US$100,000 for each of them
- that the government of Grenada was unwilling to pay. Apart from Campbell
many of the dramatis personae would have graced a novel by Charles Dickens.
One was a jurist universally known as "Sleepy" Smith because of the
difficulty he had controlling an eye-lid.

In 1991 the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights found that throughout
this pantomime the Government of the United States had violated a whole
series of articles of the American Declaration on the Rights and Duties of
Man. They included the right to life, liberty and the physical security, the
right to recognition of juridical personality and civil rights, the right to
be protected from arbitrary arrest, the right to humane treatment in
custody, the right to have the legality of detention ascertained without
delay by a court, and the right to be tried without undue delay, or, in
default of that, be released.

They have been kept in custody to this day.

It is a bizarre state of affairs when citizens of the United States and the
United Kingdom--and indeed those of Grenada - have to rely on the judiciary
rather than on supposedly democratically elected governments to get
something resembling justice. But, sadly, such is the case. As already
mentioned, various of the law lords involved in this month's judgement
played a useful role in keeping Pinochet under arrest in Britain to face
justice for this crimes and make known the spurious medical evidence on
which he was released: it was not their fault that the Blair government,
which had initially decreed his arrest, then lost its nerve, found a way of
overriding their views and allowed the old torturer to escape back to Chile
where he has just died having finally evaded the law. The law lords' latest
judgement demonstrates they can recognise a fetid Caribbean mess when one is
put under their noses.

[Hugh O'Shaughnessy, who reported Pinochet's 1973 putsch from Chile and the
US invasion from Grenada for The Observer, is the author of Grenada:
Revolution, Invasion and Aftermath (1984) and Pinochet: the Politics of
Torture (2000).]