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NEWS & LETTERS,
January-February 2002
Column: Our Life and Times by Kevin A. Barry and
Mary Holmes
Russian tribunal
If readers want a sense of how
secret military tribunals operate, they need look no further than the recent
headlines from Russia. In December, Russian Navy Captain Grigory Pasko received
a sentence of five years at hard labor for espionage. Not only was the
five-month military trial held in secret, but most of the laws under which Pasko
was tried are also secret! Despite this judicial farce, which included the
absence of any credible evidence, Pasko was convicted of giving secret military
data on the Russian Navy's dumping of nuclear waste at sea to the Japanese
media. In fact, he used public sources. Pasko, a former Navy
journalist, has remained defiant during nearly five years of investigation and
prosecution by the military-police apparatus, who evidently want to silence him
and any others who would expose the appallingly dangerous nuclear waste
situation in the oceans near Russia. Offered an amnesty in 1999 that would still
have denied him his pension, Pasko refused to accept it, insisting on a complete
acquittal. In January, ecology and human
rights activists rallied in over a dozen cities to demand Pasko's release. One
group took its protests to the headquarters of the FSB, the renamed KGB. Four of
these brave souls were arrested. In Vladivostok, where the secret trial had been
held, protesters unfurled a large yellow banner that read, "Try Corrupt
Admirals, Not Journalists." |
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