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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It might also make sense to think that others might see THEIR country as being the best in the world and therefore it isn't jealousy but a feeling that America is incorrect. Or maybe it isn't even that because most people understand that national pride and patriotism is a natural and can be a healthy thing. Perhaps many have just grown tired of hearing it. It is kind of like having a pretty friend (who you may like and admire) who keeps saying over and over "Look at me! I'm the prettiest one in the room AGAIN....Look at me, no one even COMPARES to me....What do you think of my shirt? Doesn't it bring out the blue in my gorgeous eyes...I have SUCH good taste don't I?....Everyone is just DYING to be just like me!"
Also, one must consider the standards by which one measures or judges what is considered "best". Is America the best because it is the richest? Is it the best because it is a democracy? (there are other democracies in this world). Is it the best because the people there are somehow more "moral" than the rest of the world? Is it the best because more people own SUVs and America invented MacDonalds? Is it the best because it was founded mainly by white anglo-saxon christians? How does one measure what is best?
Edited 6/18/2004 4:22 pm ET ET by suemox
And it has lost the US the moral high-ground we were always so proud of. I happen to have faith that other countries won't act as we did. Even North Korea may huff and puff, but it has no record of blowing the house down.
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Other countries could live with this because of the moral integrity of the US. The fact that we have failed to live up to our image, has done more damage to world order than we can know.
I suppose it would sit a lot better if America acknowledged when these misjudgements have resulted in catastrophic problems for other people. But this is very rare indeed. Most of the time all you get is denial. A lot of the population (I'm not saying all by any means) does not take the time to know what is going on either so when these issues get raised most people either do not care or don't believe them unless it serves their petty partisan politics to attack the other party....(and this is mainly an internal concern for them, not international).
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America is not the only nation with this problem. I suppose the four year election cycle is partly to blame (with a HUGE portion of that time being taken up with the distraction of campaigning - and this is very American....gosh how LONG is the campaigning process supposed to take? Could this not be shortened to a reasonable amount of time so the government in power isn't wasting valuable energy gallavanting around trying to get re-elected?). This is not conducive to any kind of long term foreign policy strategy.
Sure, I understand your point, but hubris prevents people from recognizing they my be incorrect: they are RIGHT.
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OF course, "best" is a judgment and it depends upon specific criteria. I really don't know what to say because I was seriously being snide.
Considering the fact that these terrorists operate in small groups across the entire globe and that all the attackers of 9/11 lived and worked in America (even learned to fly there) you could argue that simply EVERY nation has links to terrorists. Which of these nations should Bush attack next?
Edited 6/18/2004 4:20 pm ET ET by suemox
I suppose that is why pride is one of the 7 deadly sins.
Maybe a lack of pride might be a consideration when one is trying to define "best"
;o)
Of course not, but that's what makes the decision so difficult, but to put aside "desperate need" only if it's in our interest isn't a satisfactory solution in my mind.
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Sometimes the action and the result are not easily related. To fess up may make some people feel better, greater question is you can't learn from mistakes if you don't recognize them. This is why I thought we had learned something from Vietnam--Alas I guess not.
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Unfortunately, people are nationalistic. This really needs to change--globalization is upon us and we don't have the inclination to develop laws to deal with it. Fortunately we do cooperate--sometimes.
Have you ever noticed that Bush responds intuitively, and explains his position using words that appeal to American emotions. Reason in the US has been abandoned, it is really so sad.
In my opinion, this war is totally illogical, of course, links are not enough. We have no idea who the terrorist are, we have no clue how to find them and we follow false clues because there the only ones we have. I can't tell you how dissappointed I am in the US government and the American people. We have engaged in a war with an unknown. We have made that war more significant by our reaction; and we aren't in a position to clearly see a way out.
Can you please tell me what are the 7 deadly sins? I really do not know. I knew I should have listened more in bible school. :-(
Pride is useful sometimes--I only consider it a sin when it is accompanied with hubris--the worst sin IMO.
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