"The world is beginning to doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism"

Of course he doesn't! He presided over the most executions in US history! You think a little waterboarding is going to make him lose sleep?

 

More analysis of the deal...


Detainee Deal Comes With Contradictions

By ADAM LIPTAK

The compromise reached on Thursday between Congressional Republicans and the White House on the interrogations and trials of terrorism suspects is, legal experts said yesterday, a series of interlocking paradoxes.

It would impose new legal standards that it forbids the courts to enforce.

It would guarantee terrorist masterminds charged with war crimes an array of procedural protections. But it would bar hundreds of minor figures and people who say they are innocent bystanders from access to the courts to challenge their potentially lifelong detentions.

And while there is substantial disagreement about just which harsh interrogation techniques the compromise would prohibit, there is no dispute that it would allow military prosecutors to use statements that had been obtained under harsh techniques that are now banned.

The complex, technical and often ambiguous language in the 94-page measure was a subject of debate, posturing and, perhaps, some wishful thinking yesterday. Each side in the hard-fought negotiations — the White House and the three opposing Republican senators — declared victory.

And human rights groups simultaneously insisted that the new bill should be read to forbid various tough antiterrorism tactics and cautioned that the Bush administration had been given too much power to make the rules.

Some longtime critics of the administration expressed satisfaction with aspects of the compromise. They hailed the three senators who negotiated it, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, John McCain of Arizona and John W. Warner of Virginia, as leaders who placed principle over politics in stopping the effort to redefine a provision of the Geneva Conventions knows as Common Article 3.

That provision bars, among other practices, “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment.”

“The McCain, Graham, Warner trio really fought back and prevented the administration from winning its effort to reinterpret Common Article 3,” said Jennifer Daskal, the United States advocacy director for Human Rights Watch.

The proposed law, at least if it is interpreted honestly, Ms. Daskal said, would prohibit interrogation techniques like sleep deprivation, forced standing for long periods and extreme temperatures.

Others said that the negotiations were a sham and that an array of harsh techniques remained available.

“The only thing that was actually accomplished,” said Eric M. Freedman, a law professor at Hofstra University and the author of a book on habeas corpus, “was that the politicians got to announce the existence of a compromise. But in fact, most of the critical issues were not resolved.”

Martin S. Lederman, who teaches constitutional law at Georgetown, said the bill continued to allow the harsh treatment of detainees by the Central Intelligence Agency.

“They appear to have negotiated a statutory definition of cruel treatment that doesn’t cover the C.I.A. techniques,” Professor Lederman said. “And they purport to foreclose the ability of the courts to determine whether they satisfy the Geneva obligations.”

The bill would allow, and perhaps require, the president to issue regulations concerning “the meaning and application of the Geneva Conventions,” and it calls for them to be published in The Federal Register.

Legal experts differed about whether that bargain, trading power for transparency, was sound.

Changes to the procedures for the military commissions established to try terrorism suspects for war crimes also met with mixed responses. Revisions that would let defendants see the evidence against them were welcomed by military defense lawyers and human rights groups.

But some voiced concern that using statements obtained through coercion, even coercion forbidden by the McCain Amendment to Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, would still be allowed in many circumstances. So would be hearsay evidence, as well as a combination of the two.

“You create a situation,” Ms. Daskal said, “in which someone could be convicted based on a second- or third-hand statement from a detainee during an abusive interrogation.”

The issue that most engaged administration critics was the new bill’s aggressive and possibly constitutionally suspect efforts to keep the courts from hearing many detainees’ challenges or claims based on the Geneva Conventions. Though people charged with war crimes would receive trials before military commissions that largely resemble courts-martial and criminal prosecutions, the administration has announced plans to use just a score of those.

About 430 people are being held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and there is no guarantee that they will ever be tried. The legislation, unchanged by the compromise, would prohibit habeas corpus challenges to these indefinite detentions.

“You’re creating a system,” Ms. Daskal said, “where Khalid Shaikh Mohammed,” called the mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, “will have more rights than the low-level detainee who was sold into U.S. custody by bounty hunters.”

Indeed, the propriety of indefinite detentions at Guantánamo will continue to be decided by combatant status review tribunals, or C.S.R.T.’s. The revised rules for military commissions do nothing to alter the tribunals’ unorthodox procedures.

"The C.S.R.T. is the first time in U.S. history in which the lawfulness of a person’s detention is based on evidence secured by torture that’s not shared with the prisoner, that he has the burden to rebut and without the assistance of counsel,” said Joseph Margulies, author of “Guantánamo and the Abuse of Presidential Power” (Simon & Schuster, 2006).

A limited appeal from adverse determinations of these tribunals is permitted, but habeas corpus challenges are not. That means, Professor Freedman said, that “the feature of the bill that does the greatest amount of harm to the American legal system remains untouched.”

The compromise adds a wrinkle, prohibiting the very invocation of the Geneva Conventions in civil cases and habeas proceedings and, depending on how one reads an ambiguous passage, perhaps criminal cases, too.

The Senate Judiciary Committee will hold hearings on Monday on limiting detainees’ habeas challenges. If Congress does not act, Professor Freedman said, the courts may reject the habeas provisions in the law.

“An attempt to throw out of court many hundreds of pending cases that the Supreme Court has twice held have a right to be there,” he said, “is not likely to be met with a favorable reaction in the Supreme Court.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/23/us/23legal.html?ref=washington&pagewanted=print

 

I know I'm starting to sound like a broken record, but I'm really having a hard time getting over the fact that the US is going to sanction torture and be okay with it. Some excerpts from another article...

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A Republican deal on terrorism trials and interrogations would give President Bush wide latitude to interpret standards for prisoner treatment, even though it doesn't include a provision he wanted on the Geneva Conventions.

The resulting legislation, if passed next week by Congress as Republicans hope, would revive the CIA's terrorist interrogation program because it would reduce the risk that agency workers could be found guilty of war crimes.

The deal also could open the door to aggressive techniques that test the bounds of international standards of prisoner treatment.

---------------

The GOP bill outlines specific war crimes such as torture and rape, but it also says the president can "interpret the meaning and application" of the Geneva Convention standards to less severe interrogation procedures. Such a provision is intended to allow him to authorize methods that might otherwise be seen as illegal by international courts.

--------------

But when three GOP senators objected and were joined by growing numbers of allies — claiming such a move would be seen as an attempt to back out of the treaty — the White House relented. In a deal struck Thursday, the White House and Senate Republicans agreed to drop from the bill an abbreviated definition of Geneva Convention standards.

But enough legal parsing was added to the bill to achieve the president's desired effect anyway.

-----------------

The Republican bill provides legal protection for the CIA program by precisely defining and enumerating atrocities widely accepted as war crimes — including torture, rape, biological experiments, and cruel and inhuman treatment.

For acts that do not rise to the level of a war crime but may test the bounds of the Geneva Conventions, the GOP bill allows the president to make the call.

---------------

But, legal experts agree, in the end it will be up to the president to determine when most interrogation methods go too far. The bill bans detainees from protesting their detention and treatment in court.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060922...l3D1UKMwfIE;_ylu=X3oDMTA3MXN1bHE0BHNlYwN0bWE-

No judicial oversight, no congressional oversight. We are granting the president (this president) unconditional and unchecked power to do whatever he wants.

 

The media disseminates the patent falsehood (jointly emanating from the White House and GOP Senators, and unchallenged by Democrats) that the President "compromised" and everything Good was preserved. And Democratic Senators, in order to excuse their fear to take a position one way or the other, cheer the whole thing on after it's done, in the process obsequiously praising their political opponents seven weeks before a major national election.

I fear for our country.

 

Bush's "Dirty War" Amnesty Law


By Robert Parry
Consortium News

Saturday 23 September 2006

The United States is following the lead of "dirty war" nations, such as Argentina and Chile, in enacting what amounts to an amnesty law protecting U.S. government operatives, apparently up to and including President George W. Bush, who have committed or are responsible for human rights crimes.

While the focus of the current congressional debate has been on Bush's demands to redefine torture and to reinterpret the Geneva Conventions, the compromise legislation also would block prosecutions for violations already committed during the five-year-old "war on terror."

The compromise legislation bars criminal or civil legal action over past violations of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, according to press reports. Common Article 3 outlaws "violence to life and person," such as death and mutilation as well as cruel treatment and "outrages upon personal dignity."

The legislation now before Congress also would prohibit detainees from citing the Geneva Conventions as a legal basis for challenging their imprisonment or for seeking civil damages for their mistreatment. [Washington Post, Sept. 22, 2006]

Since U.S. courts generally limit plaintiff status to people who have suffered definable harm, these provisions amount to a broad amnesty law for Bush and other administration officials who have engaged in human rights violations since the 9/11 attacks.

Given the scope of Common Article 3, covering abuses ranging from personal humiliations to death, the legislation could prevent - or at least severely complicate - any legal accountability in U.S. courts for officials who have committed these offenses.

Though administration officials have said these provisions are meant to protect CIA and other government operatives in the field, the provisions also could shield senior officials up the line of command who granted the authority for acts of torture and other abuses.

These implicated officials could include Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and administration legal advisers who supplied rationales for the abuses, as well as officials who signed off on the human rights violations, such as military commanders and President Bush.


"Dirty War" Precedents

In effect, this legislation could be interpreted as a broad amnesty law, like those enacted by legislatures in Argentina and Chile to give cover to government officials who waged "dirty wars" against leftists and other political opponents in the 1970s.

Because of those amnesty laws, many perpetrators of torture, "disappearances" and extrajudicial killings were spared punishment even after the grisly details of their crimes against humanity emerged from the secret records.

In some cases, the amnesty laws were later repealed or courts struck down some provisions. But the legal delays frustrated demands for justice from victims and often the aging perpetrators then cited infirmities to prevent ever being brought to trial.

For instance, Chile is still trying to untangle the amnesty protections that were used to shield dictator Augusto Pinochet from prosecution. Pinochet, who is now 90, has also employed the infirmity defense.

The legal delays have had political consequences, too, especially in the United States where complicit American officials escaped virtually all accountability, even to their reputations. [See Consortiumnews.com's "Bush Shields Dad on Chile Terrorism."]

Some countries, such as South Africa, have combined amnesty for human rights violators with requirements that the guilty cooperate with truth commissions. That way, at least the historical record can be assembled and the crimes of state can be exposed as lessons for future generations.

The emerging U.S. amnesty law would be unusual in that it wouldn't explicitly acknowledge that offenses had been committed, nor is the word "amnesty" used. Nor have there been public hearings in Congress to determine what the Bush administration might have done that requires amnesty.

Nevertheless, the legislation, which seems to be gaining bipartisan support, would create broad areas of legal protections for Bush and other human rights violators for past crimes. By also barring victims from seeking enforcement of the Geneva Conventions in U.S. courts, the bill would give the Bush administration wide latitude for future acts of abuse.

Yet, this troubling "amnesty" signpost - for an America rushing down a path marked by previous "dirty war" states - has been passed with barely a comment on its significance.

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/092306C.shtml

 

Funny that I should watch this movie again last night...




Anyway...


Bush seeks immunity for violating War Crimes Act


Thirty-two years ago, President Gerald Ford created a political firestorm by pardoning former President Richard Nixon of all crimes he may have committed in Watergate -- and lost his election as a result. Now, President Bush, to avoid a similar public outcry, is quietly trying to pardon himself of any crimes connected with the torture and mistreatment of U.S. detainees.

The ''pardon'' is buried in Bush's proposed legislation to create a new kind of military tribunal for cases involving top al-Qaida operatives. The ''pardon'' provision has nothing to do with the tribunals. Instead, it guts the War Crimes Act of 1996, a federal law that makes it a crime, in some cases punishable by death, to mistreat detainees in violation of the Geneva Conventions and makes the new, weaker terms of the War Crimes Act retroactive to 9/11.

Press accounts of the provision have described it as providing immunity for CIA interrogators. But its terms cover the president and other top officials because the act applies to any U.S. national.

Avoiding prosecution under the War Crimes Act has been an obsession of this administration since shortly after 9/11. In a January 2002 memorandum to the president, then-White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales pointed out the problem of prosecution for detainee mistreatment under the War Crimes Act. He notes that given the vague language of the statute, no one could predict what future ''prosecutors and independent counsels'' might do if they decided to bring charges under the act. As an author of the 1978 special prosecutor statute, I know that independent counsels (who used to be called ''special prosecutors'' prior to the statute's reauthorization in 1994) aren't for low-level government officials such as CIA interrogators, but for the president and his Cabinet. It is clear that Gonzales was concerned about top administration officials.

Gonzales also understood that the specter of prosecution could hang over top administration officials involved in detainee mistreatment throughout their lives. Because there is no statute of limitations in cases where death resulted from the mistreatment, prosecutors far into the future, not appointed by Bush or beholden to him, would be making the decisions whether to prosecute.

To ''reduce the threat of domestic criminal prosecution under the War Crimes Act,'' Gonzales recommended that Bush not apply the Geneva Conventions to al-Qaida and the Taliban. Since the War Crimes Act carried out the Geneva Conventions, Gonzales reasoned that if the Conventions didn't apply, neither did the War Crimes Act. Bush implemented the recommendation on Feb. 7, 2002.

When the Supreme Court recently decided that the Conventions did apply to al-Qaida and Taliban detainees, the possibility of criminal liability for high-level administration officials reared its ugly head again.

What to do? The administration has apparently decided to secure immunity from prosecution through legislation. Under cover of the controversy involving the military tribunals and whether they could use hearsay or coerced evidence, the administration is trying to pardon itself, hoping that no one will notice. The urgent timetable has to do more than anything with the possibility that the next Congress may be controlled by Democrats, who will not permit such a provision to be adopted.

Creating immunity retroactively for violating the law sets a terrible precedent. The president takes an oath of office to uphold the Constitution; that document requires him to obey the laws, not violate them. A president who knowingly and deliberately violates U.S. criminal laws should not be able to use stealth tactics to immunize himself from liability, and Congress should not go along.


Elizabeth Holtzman, a former New York congresswoman, is co-author with Cynthia L. Cooper of The Impeachment of George W. Bush: A Practical Guide for Concerned Citizens.

http://www.suntimes.com/cgi-bin/pri...mes.com/output/otherviews/cst-edt-ref23b.html