"And I wouldn't join it. And I understand that in certain capitals around the world that that wasn't a popular move. But it's the right move not to join a foreign court that could -- where our people could be prosecuted." - George W. Bush 09/30/04
I use that comment to open most of my posts on the torture scandal. The point I'm particularly making by doing so is that Bush's refusal to participate in or even cooperate with the International Criminal Court was not based on the defense of some abstract "national rights" (my phrase; I haven't heard the Reps use it yet.) It's very reminiscent of the Southern segregationists who once claimed they opposed federal anti-lynching laws based on "state rights."
When Bush made that comment this past August, he certainly knew about the torture policy, though he's likely going to spend the rest of his life denying that he knew everything that was going on. And I'm sure he didn't authorize each individual beating, or rape, or every instance of turning dogs loose on a naked prisoner to rip out chunks of his flesh. But he knew that his administration had launched a preventive war against Iraq and that they were disregarding the Geneva Convention with the torture policy.
Bush and his administration have good reason to worry about being hauled into court.
It strikes me that the public discussion over the Gonzalez nomination is going to be very unpleasant to hear at times. Because, as John Dean says, "war crimes are as ugly as it gets."
Gonzales Helped Set the Course for Detainees by R. Jeffrey Smith and Dan Eggen Washington Post 01/05/05.
White House counsel Alberto R. Gonzales chaired the meetings on this issue [torture in the gulag], which included detailed descriptions of interrogation techniques such as "waterboarding," a tactic intended to make detainees feel as if they are drowning. He raised no objections and, without consulting military and State Department experts in the laws of torture and war, approved an August 2002 memo that gave CIA interrogators the legal blessings they sought.
Gonzales, working closely with a small group of conservative legal officials at the White House, the Justice Department and the Defense Department -- and overseeing deliberations that generally excluded potential dissenters -- helped chart other legal paths in the handling and imprisonment of suspected terrorists and the applicability of international conventions to U.S. military and law enforcement activities.
His former colleagues say that throughout this period, Gonzales -- a confidant of George W. Bush's from Texas and the president's nominee to be the next attorney general -- often repeated a phrase used by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to spur tougher anti-terrorism policies: "Are we being forward-leaning enough?"
The Smith/Eggers article also raises important questions about the extent to which Dick Cheney's office was involved in developing the torture policy.
Bush's Counsel Sought Ruling About Torture by David Johnston and Neil Lewis New York Times 01/05/05.
As the White House's chief lawyer, Mr. Gonzales supervised the production of a number of legal memorandums that shaped the administration's legal framework for conducting its battle against Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups. Of the documents that have been made public, only one was written by Mr. Gonzales. In that memorandum, dated January 2002, he advised Mr. Bush that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to fighters captured in Afghanistan. The next month the White House decided that the Geneva Conventions would be applied to Taliban captives but not to detainees linked to Al Qaeda.
As a result, a major area of questioning at his confirmation hearing is expected to be the role he played in the production of the other documents, like the August 2002 memorandum. That memorandum concluded that interrogators had great leeway to question detainees using coercive techniques that they could assert were not torture.
One aspect of this that I'm sure Gonzalez' supporters in the Torture Party will try to downplay is that it is illegal for an attorney to conspire with a client to commit crimes. If Gonzales failed to clearly advise the president that the torture policy being conteplated was illegal, he's most likely guilty of a felony.
And the Republicans who are ready to vote to confirm this criminal torture lawyer as the country's highest law-enforcement official impeached a president just a few years ago over a half-baked affair. In the Republican Values of that party today, blow jobs are far worse than criminal and sadistic torture.
1 comment:
What absolutely disgusts me is that Gonzales not only justified torture in the Bybee memo of 2002 but also justified the outsourcing of torture in his memo of 2004.
And wingnuts say it's a big ado about nothing, saying "waterboarding" is a tactic used to train our military personnel, so why is it such a bad method to use on prisoners? That in the latter case it's used as a method of coercion, not training, seems to be totally lost on them.
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