Bush & Rumsfeld Out of Control
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| Tue, 06-08-2004 - 5:48am |
The team of Bush & Rumsfeld have reduced the <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" />United States government to the level of the Spanish inquisition. They’re ruined my wonderful country so that now, instead of the light of the world, we are an evil power. Torturing POWs is abhorrent to all civilized people that’s why nations agreed to accept the first Geneva Convention in 1864, right up to the fourth in 1949 . The United States signed all the additional protocols added up to 1977, but congress didn’t ratify the 1977 addition concerning the treatment of guerilla fighters. Bush is using this to claim that he had the right to order torture. He has even flaunted our own country’s law against torture. The man is an out of control menace to civilization. He has not learned from history, perhaps because he read any.
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http://hnn.us/articles/586.html
I don’t want to hear the childish “Well, Saddam tortured them worse†line of reasoning. I’ve had it. Two wrongs have never made a right. These people need to be impeached.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/08/politics/08ABUS.html?hp=&pagewanted=print&position=
June 8, 2004
Lawyers Decided Bans on Torture Didn't Bind Bush
By NEIL A. LEWIS and ERIC SCHMITT
WASHINGTON, June 7 — A team of administration lawyers concluded in a March 2003 legal memorandum that President Bush was not bound by either an international treaty prohibiting torture or by a federal antitorture law because he had the authority as commander in chief to approve any technique needed to protect the nation's security.
The memo, prepared for Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, also said that any executive branch officials, including those in the military, could be immune from domestic and international prohibitions against torture for a variety of reasons.
One reason, the lawyers said, would be if military personnel believed that they were acting on orders from superiors "except where the conduct goes so far as to be patently unlawful."
"In order to respect the president's inherent constitutional authority to manage a military campaign," the lawyers wrote in the 56-page confidential memorandum, the prohibition against torture "must be construed as inapplicable to interrogation undertaken pursuant to his commander-in-chief authority."
Senior Pentagon officials on Monday sought to minimize the significance of the March memo, one of several obtained by The New York Times, as an interim legal analysis that had no effect on revised interrogation procedures that Mr. Rumsfeld approved in April 2003 for the American military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
"The April document was about interrogation techniques and procedures," said Lawrence Di Rita, the Pentagon's chief spokesman. "It was not a legal analysis."
Mr. Di Rita said the 24 interrogation procedures permitted at Guantánamo, four of which required Mr. Rumsfeld's explicit approval, did not constitute torture and were consistent with international treaties.
The March memorandum, which was first reported by The Wall Street Journal on Monday, is the latest internal legal study to be disclosed that shows that after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks the administration's lawyers were set to work to find legal arguments to avoid restrictions imposed by international and American law.
A Jan. 22, 2002, memorandum from the Justice Department that provided arguments to keep American officials from being charged with war crimes for the way prisoners were detained and interrogated was used extensively as a basis for the March memorandum on avoiding proscriptions against torture.
The previously disclosed Justice Department memorandum concluded that administration officials were justified in asserting that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to detainees from the Afghanistan war.
Another memorandum obtained by The Times indicates that most of the administration's top lawyers, with the exception of those at the State Department and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, approved of the Justice Department's position that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to the war in Afghanistan. In addition, that memorandum, dated Feb. 2, 2002, noted that lawyers for the Central Intelligence Agency had asked for an explicit understanding that the administration's public pledge to abide by the spirit of the conventions did not apply to its operatives.
The March memo, a copy of which was obtained by The Times, was prepared as part of a review of interrogation techniques by a working group appointed by the Defense Department's general counsel, William J. Haynes. The group itself was led by the Air Force general counsel, Mary Walker, and included military and civilian lawyers from all branches of the armed services.
The review stemmed from concerns raised by Pentagon lawyers and interrogators at Guantánamo after Mr. Rumsfeld approved a set of harsher interrogation techniques in December 2002 to use on a Saudi detainee, Mohamed al-Kahtani, who was believed to be the planned 20th hijacker in the Sept. 11 terror plot.
Mr. Rumsfeld suspended the harsher techniques, including serving the detainee cold, prepackaged food instead of hot rations and shaving off his facial hair, on Jan. 12, pending the outcome of the working group's review. Gen. James T. Hill, head of the military's Southern Command, which oversees Guantánamo, told reporters last Friday that the working group "wanted to do what is humane and what is legal and consistent not only with" the Geneva Conventions, but also "what is right for our soldiers."
Mr. Di Rita said that the Pentagon officials were focused primarily on the interrogation techniques, and that the legal rationale included in the March memo was mostly prepared by the Justice Department and White House counsel's office.
The memo showed that not only lawyers from the Defense and Justice departments and the White House approved of the policy but also that David S. Addington, the counsel to Vice President Dick Cheney, also was involved in the deliberations. The State Department lawyer, William H. Taft IV, dissented, warning that such a position would weaken the protections of the Geneva Conventions for American troops.
The March 6 document about torture provides tightly constructed definitions of torture. For example, if an interrogator "knows that severe pain will result from his actions, if causing such harm is not his objective, he lacks the requisite specific intent even though the defendant did not act in good faith," the report said. "Instead, a defendant is guilty of torture only if he acts with the express purpose of inflicting severe pain or suffering on a person within his control."
The adjective "severe," the report said, "makes plain that the infliction of pain or suffering per se, whether it is physical or mental, is insufficient to amount to torture. Instead, the text provides that pain or suffering must be `severe.' " The report also advised that if an interrogator "has a good faith belief his actions will not result in prolonged mental harm, he lacks the mental state necessary for his actions to constitute torture."
The report also said that interrogators could justify breaching laws or treaties by invoking the doctrine of necessity. An interrogator using techniques that cause harm might be immune from liability if he "believed at the moment that his act is necessary and designed to avoid greater harm."
Scott Horton, the former head of the human rights committee of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York, said Monday that he believed that the March memorandum on avoiding responsibility for torture was what caused a delegation of military lawyers to visit him and complain privately about the administration's confidential legal arguments. That visit, he said, resulted in the association undertaking a study and issuing of a report criticizing the administration. He added that the lawyers who drafted the torture memo in March could face professional sanctions.
Jamie Fellner, the director of United States programs for Human Rights Watch, said Monday, "We believe that this memo shows that at the highest levels of the Pentagon there was an interest in using torture as well as a desire to evade the criminal consequences of doing so."
The March memorandum also contains a curious section in which the lawyers argued that any torture committed at Guantánamo would not be a violation of the anti-torture statute because the base was under American legal jurisdiction and the statute concerns only torture committed overseas. That view is in direct conflict with the position the administration has taken in the Supreme Court, where it has argued that prisoners at Guantánamo Bay are not entitled to constitutional protections because the base is outside American jurisdiction.
Kate Zernike contributed reporting for this article

Elaine
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"Evidence remains strong that an intelligence officer/sabotage expert Ahmed Al-Ani of Iraq’s secret police agency Mukhabarat met with Mohamed Atta in Prague, contrary to false stories spread in the Leftist media (e.g., the New York Times). Atta, it turns out, may have had as many as four trips to Prague for such meetings with high level Iraqis, one as early as December 1994."
"Iraqi embassies provided assistance, safe houses and documents to al Qaeda members as far from Baghdad as the Philippines. Those involved in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the 1998 embassy bombings in Africa, the 2000 attack on the U.S.S. Cole, and at least two of the 9-11 terrorists all had contacts with Iraqi diplomatic facilitator Ahmed Hikmat Shakir"
http://www.csis-scrs.gc.ca/eng/miscdocs/200110_e.html
Some countries are 'allowed' via US veto to continue to defy international laws and treaties. The rules are not applied equally. After all, the US was a FRIEND of Saddam for the longest time, and sold him the very weapons that allowed Iraq to gas thousands of Iranians...even though it already knew how horrible he was. But I digress..
The bottomline is that DOUBLE STANDARDS prevail.
But while on the subject of sources, where does the text in quotes come from? Did I miss something?
Edited 6/17/2004 3:45 pm ET ET by nicecanadianlady
Edited 6/17/2004 3:46 pm ET ET by nicecanadianlady
First of all OPEN BOARD, I can type what ever I want.(As long as I don't directly attack any one poster, or so I've been told)
Secondly, My OP(212)was not a response to you so why are you taking it so personally? General statements are made all the time on this board by both sides aganist the other. My post did not single you out in any way....so chill!!!
(http://tokyo.usembassy.gov/e/p/tp-sec20021121a1.html)
Then your son was not arrested for no reason. He was arrested because another citizen accused him of committing a crime. Now if you're going to tell me your son was taken down to the station and tortured until he confessed, I'll agree we have a problem. But what are the police supposed to do, not investigate accusations of wrongdoing?
What does your story have to do with the Patriot Act? It could have happened at any time, in any country. If the police get a report that someone is going around threatening people with guns, they have a duty to investigate it, do they not? It's a shame what happened to your son, but it is not the fault of the police or of the Patriot Act or of the United States. It is the fault of the man who filed the false report. In the same way, it is not our investigators fault if they are given incorrect intelligence and mistakenly arrest someone. What are they supposed to do, not arrest anyone just in case their information might be wrong, even though in the vast majority of cases it is accurate? Like I said, no law enforcement or military arm is perfect, there will be mistakes, but this is war, and not a conventioanl war, and we cannot afford not to be overly cautious.
No, I never said torture was justified by anything, only that some interrogation techniques not legal under the Geneva conventions are legal under other circumstances. Torture, which is defined as infliction of severe physical or emotional pain, is not justified and is illegal under both US law and international law. That's what the memo says,if you read it.
It's not justified for anyone-we don't bomb civilians-we do everything we can to warn civilians, to avoid hitting civilian targets-some civilians are unintentionally killed, that's true. But we do not target civilians, and targeting civilians is never justified.
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