You might find this article interesting... Dick Cheney's warped vision of the world http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/
I guess I need to relearn civics -- Cheney tells agency that Vice President's office is not part of the executive branch Michael Roston Published: Thursday June 21, 2007 The Office of Vice President Dick Cheney told an agency within the National Archives that for purposes of securing classified information, the Vice President's office is not an 'entity within the executive branch' according to a letter released Thursday by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. "The Oversight Committee has learned that over the objections of the National Archives, you exempted the Office of the Vice President from the presidential executive order that establishes a uniform, government-wide system for safeguarding classified national security information," Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA), the Committee's chairman, wrote in a letter to Cheney. "Your decision to exempt your office from the President's order is problematic because it could place national security secrets at risk. It is also hard to understand given the history of security breaches involving officials in your office." Waxman noted that Cheney's office had declared itself not affected by an executive order amended by President George W. Bush in 2003 regarding classification and declassification of government materials. "Your position was that your office 'does not believe it is included in the definition of 'agency' as set forth in the Order' and 'does not consider itself an 'entity within the executive branch' that comes into the possession of classified information,'" a National Archives official claims Cheney chief of staff David Addington wrote to him. The Vice President's office's refusal to comply with the executive order and the National Archives's request prompted the National Archives to file a complaint with the Attorney General's office. But the Justice Department has not followed up on the Archives's request. http://rawstory.com/news/2007/Cheney_tells_agency_that_Vice_Presidents_0621.html
Didn't know if this should go here or in the Bush Legacy thread. The WaPo is running a 4 pert series on Cheney and how he has shaped the Bush Presidency. Today was part 1. It's pretty intense, but Steve Benen @ TMP has a great opening analysis of who really controls power in the Bush administration. ------------------ The article is not explicit, but an underlying theme of the Washington Post's profile on Dick Cheney is that his unprecedented power is only possible because Bush is anxious to get out of the way. "Side-by-side wing chairs"? I'm reminded of the embarrassing point in 2004 in which the President agreed to talk to the 9/11 Commission, but only if Cheney could sit with Bush, and help answer questions, during the discussion. In 2000, when Bush, an inexperienced governor in a state where the governor has limited power, sought the presidency, his supporters insisted the nation need not worry -- Bush had assembled a team of capable "advisors" who would help guide his hand. What the equation didn't consider is what happens when the advisors disagree and the President has to make a decision. As the Post's profile makes clear, Bush has spent the better part of the last six years simply going along with Cheney's demands. Dan Quayle characterized this as Cheney taking on the role of "surrogate chief of staff." The reality is more disconcerting -- Cheney has routinely been the "surrogate President," with Bush putting his signature on the VP's ideas (military commissions, domestic warrantless-searches) because the VP told him it was the right thing to do. Indeed, when it came to ignoring the Geneva Conventions, Cheney made his decision before Bush did. Meet George W. Bush, the not-so-innocent bystander of his own presidency. -- Steve Benen
King Richard? edit: In addition, does this rhetoric by Cheney not scare the **** out of everyone? I am afraid what kind of **** is about to be pulled...
I don't believe terrorists deserve to be treated as prisoners of war... There is reasoning on this argument...I particularly feel this makes sense: "These individuals function separately from any formal structure that could be called governance. And there is no right to the Geneva Convention because the Geneva Convention presumes certain statuses of combat and that there are certain engagements, even though it is in war, that have rules relative to what can and should be done in a war that is appropriate. None of these people are signatories to the Geneva Convention; they have no rights under the Geneva Convention; and they disavow the purposes of the Geneva Convention. Their purpose is to kill for the reason that they believe their life will be improved and their afterlife, as they see it in their perverse view of Islam--which is a great religion but is being perverted by these fundamentalists. Their purpose is to kill Americans and destroy Western culture. To ascribe to them certain rights, as if they were citizens of our Nation or citizens of some other nation that we were at war with, or as if they were participants in a group that was signatory to the Geneva Convention, is to undermine, first, the legitimacy of nations and what nations stand for; and, secondly, the legitimacy of treaties and what treaties stand for because you are essentially ascribing to these people rights and values which they reject and which they are fighting against." nate.gov/~gregg/statements/2006%20statements/0710_supreme_court_decision_terrorist.htm
This has already been discussed repeatedly. Terrorists / unlawful combatants while not necessarily applicable under the Third Geneva Convention are still applicable under the Fourth Geneva Convention. So while they may not be considered as POW's they cannot be held in legal limbo in a lawless state. The USSC has affirmed this.
Next up in the WaPo Cheney series. How Cheney made torture all the rage with the kids. And that silly little enabler, Alberto “Fredo” Gonzales http://blog.washingtonpost.com/cheney/chapters/pushing_the_enevelope_on_presi/index.html
is gonzales more like fredo or tom? and a bunch of low level privates and sergeants go to prison for doing what the administration advocated for them to do. ive said it before and ill say it again - the people going to prison should be bush, cheney, rummy, gonzales, yoo, rice, ect. this is just another in a long line of felonies committed by these criminals. this is a clear violation of the geneva convention and the u.s. war crimes act. by law, a felony. so by this standard the president can bbq babies on the white house lawn and snort cocaine. what they are saying is that the president is above the law. very similar to nixons statement to the effect "when the president does it, it is not illegal". again, by u.s. law, what the administration authorized was a war crime. This came out in response to a question in a December 1, 2005 debate in Chicago with Notre Dame professor and international human rights scholar Doug Cassel. Cassel: If the President deems that he’s got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person’s child, there is no law that can stop him? Yoo: No treaty. Cassel: Also no law by Congress. That is what you wrote in the August 2002 memo. Yoo: I think it depends on why the President thinks he needs to do that. im against the death penalty, but tyrants have been executed for far less than what this administration has done.
So it is but our own democracy has made it a crime to threaten the life of the President. A law which long predates the current Admin..
just to be clear, i did not in any way threaten the life of the president. merely pointed out that by law, acts authorized by this administration can be punishable by death. if the president really is "the decider" and "the commander guy" than he bears ultimate responsibility for what he authorized. this is a good article on the subject... http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/27/AR2006072701908_pf.html An obscure law approved by a Republican-controlled Congress a decade ago has made the Bush administration nervous that officials and troops involved in handling detainee matters might be accused of committing war crimes, and prosecuted at some point in U.S. courts. Senior officials have responded by drafting legislation that would grant U.S. personnel involved in the terrorism fight new protections against prosecution for past violations of the War Crimes Act of 1996. That law criminalizes violations of the Geneva Conventions governing conduct in war and threatens the death penalty if U.S.-held detainees die in custody from abusive treatment. In light of a recent Supreme Court ruling that the international Conventions apply to the treatment of detainees in the terrorism fight, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales has spoken privately with Republican lawmakers about the need for such "protections," according to someone who heard his remarks last week. Gonzales told the lawmakers that a shield is needed for actions taken by U.S. personnel under a 2002 presidential order, which the Supreme Court declared illegal, and under Justice Department legal opinions that have been withdrawn under fire, the source said. A spokeswoman for Gonzales, Tasia Scolinos, declined to comment on Gonzales's remarks. The Justice Department's top legal adviser, Steven G. Bradbury, separately testified two weeks ago that Congress must give new "definition and certainty" to captors' risk of prosecution for coercive interrogations that fall short of outright torture. Language in the administration's draft, which Bradbury helped prepare in concert with civilian officials at the Defense Department, seeks to protect U.S. personnel by ruling out detainee lawsuits to enforce Geneva protections and by incorporating language making U.S. enforcement of the War Crimes Act subject to U.S. -- not foreign -- understandings of what the Conventions require. The aim, Justice Department lawyers say, is also to take advantage of U.S. legal precedents that limit sanctions to conduct that "shocks the conscience." This phrase allows some consideration by courts of the context in which abusive treatment occurs, such as an urgent need for information, the lawyers say -- even though the Geneva prohibitions are absolute. The Supreme Court, in contrast, has repeatedly said that foreign interpretations of international treaties such as the Geneva Conventions should at least be considered by U.S. courts. Some human rights groups and independent experts say they oppose undermining the reach of the War Crimes Act, arguing that it deters government misconduct. They say any step back from the Geneva Conventions could provoke mistreatment of captured U.S. military personnel. They also contend that Bush administration anxieties about prosecutions are overblown and should not be used to gain congressional approval for rough interrogations. "The military has lived with" the Geneva Conventions provisions "for 50 years and applied them to every conflict, even against irregular forces. Why are we suddenly afraid now about the vagueness of its terms?" asked Tom Malinowski, director of the Washington office of Human Rights Watch. Since the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003, hundreds of service members deployed to Iraq have been accused by the Army of mistreating detainees, and at least 35 detainees have died in military or CIA custody, according to a tally kept by Human Rights First. The military has asserted these were all aberrant acts by troops ignoring their orders. Defense attorneys for many of those accused of involvement have alleged that their clients were pursuing policies of rough treatment set by officials in Washington. That claim is amplified in a 53-page Human Rights Watch report this week that quoted interrogators at three bases in Iraq as saying that abuse was part of regular, authorized procedures. But this argument has yet to gain traction in a military court, where U.S. policy requires that active-duty service members be tried for any maltreatment. The War Crimes Act, in contrast, affords access to civilian courts for abuse perpetrated by former service members and by civilians. The government has not filed any charges under the law. The law's legislative sponsor is one of the House's most conservative members, Rep. Walter B. Jones Jr. (R-N.C.). He proposed it after a chance meeting with a retired Navy pilot who had spent six years in the notorious "Hanoi Hilton," a Vietnamese prison camp. The conversation left Jones angry about Washington's inability to prosecute the pilot's abusers. Jones's legislation for the first time imposed criminal penalties in the United States for breaches of the Geneva Conventions, which protect detainees anywhere. The Defense Department's deputy general counsel at the time declared at the sole hearing on it in 1996 -- attended by just two lawmakers -- that "we fully support the purposes of the bill," and urged its expansion to cover a wider range of war crimes. The Republican-controlled House passed the bill by voice vote, and the Senate approved it by unanimous consent. The law initially criminalized grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions but was amended without a hearing the following year to include violations of Common Article 3, the minimum standard requiring that all detainees be treated "humanely." The article bars murder, mutilation, cruel treatment, torture and "outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment." It applies to any abuse involving U.S. military personnel or "nationals." Jones and other advocates intended the law for use against future abusers of captured U.S. troops in countries such as Bosnia, El Salvador and Somalia, but the Pentagon supported making its provisions applicable to U.S. personnel because doing so set a high standard for others to follow. Mary DeRosa, a legal adviser at the National Security Council from 1997 to 2001, said the threat of sanctions in U.S. courts in fact helped deter senior officials from approving some questionable actions. She said the law is not an impediment in the terrorism fight. Since September 2001, however, Bush administration officials have considered the law a potential threat to U.S. personnel involved in interrogations. While serving as White House legal counsel in 2002, Gonzales helped prepare a Jan. 25 draft memo to Bush -- written in large part by David Addington, then Vice President Cheney's legal counsel and now Cheney's chief of staff -- in which he cited the threat of prosecution under the act as a reason to declare that detainees captured in Afghanistan were not eligible for Geneva Conventions protections. "It is difficult," Gonzales said in the memo, "to predict the motives of prosecutors and independent counsels who may in the future decide to bring unwarranted charges." He also argued for the flexibility to pursue various interrogation methods and said that only a presidential order exempting detainees from Geneva protections "would provide a solid defense to any future prosecution." That month, Bush approved an order exempting those captured in Afghanistan from these protections. But the Supreme Court's ruling in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld effectively made Bush's order illegal when it affirmed that all detainees held by the United States are protected by Common Article 3. The court's decision caught the administration unprepared, at first, for questions about how its policy would change. On July 7, Deputy Secretary of Defense Gordon England signed a memorandum ordering all military departments to certify that their actions in the fight with al-Qaeda comply with Article 3. Several officials said the memo, which was reviewed by military lawyers, was provoked by the renewed threat of prosecution under the War Crimes Act. England's memo was not sent to other agencies for review. Two White House officials heavily involved in past policymaking on detainee treatment matters, counsel Harriet Miers and Addington, told friends later that they had not been briefed before its release and were unhappy about its language, according to an informed source. Bradbury and Gonzales have since drafted legislation to repair what they consider the defects of the War Crimes Act and the ambiguities of Common Article 3. Several officials said the administration's main concerns are Article 3's prohibitions against "outrages upon personal dignity" and humiliating or degrading treatment. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld told reporters on July 12 that he supported clearing up ambiguities so that military personnel are not "charged with wrongdoing when in fact they were not engaged in wrongdoing." Several advocates and experts nonetheless said the legal liability of administration officials for past interrogations is probably small. "I think these guys did unauthorized stuff, they violated the War Crimes Act, and they should be prosecuted," said Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, a New York-based group that has provided lawyers for detainees at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Ratner said authorized interrogation techniques such as stress positions, temperature extremes and sleep deprivation are "clearly outlawed" under Common Article 3. But he added that prosecutions are improbable because the Justice Department -- which has consistently asserted that such rough interrogations are legal -- is unlikely to bring them. U.S. officials could argue in any event, Ratner said, that they were following policies they believed to be legal, and "a judge would most likely say that is a decent defense." Some officials at the Pentagon share the view that illegal actions have been taken. Alberto J. Mora, the Navy's general counsel from 2001 until the end of last year, warned the Pentagon's general counsel twice that some approved interrogation methods violated "domestic and international legal norms" and that a federal court might eventually find responsibility "along the entire length of the chain of command," according to a 2004 memo by Mora that recounted the warnings. The memo was first obtained by the New Yorker magazine. At a July 13 hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee, the Air Force's top military lawyer, Maj. Gen. Jack L. Rives, affirmed that "some of the techniques that have been authorized and used in the past have violated Common Article 3" of the Geneva Conventions. The top military lawyers for the Army, Navy and Marine Corps, who were seated next to Rives, said they agreed.
I don't care who affirmed it...How is it applicable under the fourth? I read the 4th...uncertain in the wording...I believe in the reasoning for the argument.
The Fourth Geneva Convention Relative to Protections of Civillians in Time of War http://www.unhchr.ch/html/menu3/b/92.htm Exerpts.(highlights my own for emphasis) Article 1 The High Contracting Parties undertake to respect and to ensure respect for the present Convention in all circumstances. Article 3 In the case of armed conflict not of an international character occurring in the territory of one of the High Contracting Parties, each Party to the conflict shall be bound to apply, as a minimum, the following provisions: 1. Persons taking no active part in the hostilities, including members of armed forces who have laid down their arms and those placed hors de combat by sickness, wounds, detention, or any other cause, shall in all circumstances be treated humanely, without any adverse distinction founded on race, colour, religion or faith, sex, birth or wealth, or any other similar criteria. To this end, the following acts are and shall remain prohibited at any time and in any place whatsoever with respect to the above-mentioned persons: (a) Violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture; (b) Taking of hostages; (c) Outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment; Article 4 Persons protected by the Convention are those who, at a given moment and in any manner whatsoever, find themselves, in case of a conflict or occupation, in the hands of a Party to the conflict or Occupying Power of which they are not nationals. (My own comment: This would apply to Iraqis and Afghanis captured in those countries by US and Allied forces) Nationals of a State which is not bound by the Convention are not protected by it. Nationals of a neutral State who find themselves in the territory of a belligerent State, and nationals of a co-belligerent State, shall not be regarded as protected persons while the State of which they are nationals has normal diplomatic representation in the State in whose hands they are. (My own comment: This is stating nationals such as foriegn Al Qaeda fighters are not protected but see further..) Article 5 Where, in the territory of a Party to the conflict, the latter is satisfied that an individual protected person is definitely suspected of or engaged in activities hostile to the security of the State, such individual person shall not be entitled to claim such rights and privileges under the present Convention as would, if exercised in the favour of such individual person, be prejudicial to the security of such State. Where in occupied territory an individual protected person is detained as a spy or saboteur, or as a person under definite suspicion of activity hostile to the security of the Occupying Power, such person shall, in those cases where absolute military security so requires, be regarded as having forfeited rights of communication under the present Convention. (These would also seem to imply that foreign Al Qaeda fighters aren't protected but..) In each case, such persons shall nevertheless be treated with humanity, and in case of trial, shall not be deprived of the rights of fair and regular trial prescribed by the present Convention. They shall also be granted the full rights and privileges of a protected person under the present Convention at the earliest date consistent with the security of the State or Occupying Power, as the case may be. (The occupying power still has to treat them humanely and protect them.) And again all of this has been affirmed by the US Supreme Court in regard to the detention and treatment of terrorists / unlawful combatants that they entitled certain rights and cannot be held indefinately in an unlawful state.
