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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I am confused now. I thought you were referring to what happened in the prison controlled by the American army. That was not interrogation techniques. That was torture, as described by top American officials. They were beaten, some died. It was also psychological torture. Threatening to kill them by putting them underwater, or electrocuting them, sodomizing them. Some people on this board have labelled it as "just showing them naked. Big deal.." Do these people watch the same AMERICAN news I watch or they just selectively hear only the parts they like?
Why is it American soldiers treated better GERMAN NAZIS prisoners during WW2? What happened to America since the 1940s? The Nazis killed millions of innocent people, and they were the OCCUPIERS! Iraqis didn't kill millions (Saddam did kill many, but again, that's Saddam, not Iraqis. Iraqis are now the ones who's country was attacked and destroyed. If your country was attacked, would't you fight back? What if your entire family had been killed as "collateral damage" by a country's army who attacked to "save you from Saddam" but in the process killed more people than Saddam ever did?
Edited 6/18/2004 10:20 am ET ET by nicecanadianlady
I agree with you 100%. The kids serving in the military are for the most part young and inexperienced like this. I feel that they most probably did receive some kind of instructions to "soften" up the prisonners for questionning and probably some kind of rudimentary and half-assed training/insight into the arab mind. The very fact that they had this type of "torture" equipment available at their disposal shows that these hardline tactics were condoned/desired from higher up (although the kids may have crossed the line and took things to the extreme). Obviously, given the age experience etc...of these kids, I think that their instructions were likely left way too open-ended and open to interpretation which resulted in (based upon human nature, their maturity level and the sress they are facing) these unfortunate events. This is something that should have been carefully considered/acknowledged by the administration from the very beginning. I've been in the military myself and I find it hard to believe that the goings on were not known by those higher up in rank and age. There is always someone available in a position of authority around night and day....or at least there should have been. What these kids were doing to the prisonners was not quiet.....I'm sure there was a lot of noise and activity that could not possibly have gone undetected by someone in authority. Heads SHOULD roll and I don't just mean the heads of the kids in the photographs either.
To carry this point a little further (and this is just an important observation and is in no way intended to justify the actions of the Iraqi insurgents/terrorists) You just have to look at the age of the typical Iraqi male that is participating in the violent acts against the American occupation. These guys are young too (half-baked) with life experiences that are simply terrible compared to those of the typical North American kid Unemployment is extremely high in the Arab world and (I don't have time to find the link showing the demographics right now but if memory serves me...) around 80% of the population is under the age of 20. What does this tell you about these young angry idealistic arab men with nothing to lose and time on their hands?
This is something that has to be carefully taken into account when others are sitting back in judgement of what is happening in these countries. Yes, there are complex social and religious issues that differentiates these people from us....but given their ages and life experiences, we may be simply looking at human nature at work. Take some children from America and raise them in the same sort of atmosphere and we will find the penchant for this kind of violence transcends nationalities and race (unless we are talking about the human race in general)....Therefore the question remains....are these people really "evil" (therefore beyond hope) as folks in the western world (the current administration in particular) likes to label them or are they simply human and are doing what comes naturally given the situation they are in?
I agree that evil people do exist....that there are poeple that will have no conscience or sense of morality no matter what background they come from. However, is TRUE "evil" any more prevalent in the arab world than anywhere else?
Labelling them "evil" and Bush has done on numerous occasions is a cop-out and an easy way to dehumanize them. It justifyies treating them as inferior human beings in the eyes of others who take this simplistic view. I love what America stands for (at least what I THOUGHT America stood for). I don't find that this administration accurately reflects that despite the fact that they have successfuly managed to sell so many on the idea that they personify American values.
It wasn't so dumb. You want to read dumb things? Go back and re-read some of Bush's speeches.
Well I was going to do the exact same thing but Bailyhouse beat me to it.
Edited 6/18/2004 12:01 pm ET ET by suemox
Look, since you have been here a lot longer than many others (and seem to have an inate sense of your own superiotiry because of it) you have hundreds of posts where you have stated your opinion without any facts whatsoever to back them up. This is a DEBATE board and it is perfectly acceptable to debate one's opinions. As a matter of fact, if we were to compare your debating style to others on the board I would even argue that you are one of those least likely to include some links or facts in your posts. If you disagree with someone's opinion and you are so enamored with the concept that every point should be backed up with facts then get off your duff and do some of your own research to counter the "opinions" of others that you happen to disagree with.
I found that she stated her views very eloquently. Everyone has a unique way of putting together their thoughts and whether or not some of these issues were debated in the past has absolutely no relevance what-so-ever.
Actually yes. Many kings fought in battles.
You replied:Actually yes. Many kings fought in battles.
I agree and I would like to add that all chiefs led their warriors into battle. I know of none that cowered in a tepee.
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