Newsweek has uncovered some amazing memos that demonstrate how even several years ago Colin Powell was warning that abandoning the Geneva Conventions was probably a mistake, and could lead to war crimes prosecutions against not only US soldiers but high-ranking US officials implicated in condoning any torture or other contraventions of the Protocols. Here’s White House counsel, Alberto Gonzales, saying “hell yeah do what you want”. And here’s Colin Powell and his legal advisor warning that doing this would not only ruin US credibility and make it more difficult to fight the “War on Terror” because countries that still respected the Geneva Protocols (basically, everyone but the US, Myanmar, North Korea, and Syria) could legitimately refuse to extradite suspects to a country like the US where human rights were being explicitly curtailed.
In the memo, the White House lawyer focused on a little known 1996 law passed by Congress, known as the War Crimes Act, that banned any Americans from committing war crimesdefined in part as “grave breaches” of the Geneva Conventions … One key advantage of declaring that Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters did not have Geneva Convention protections is that it “substantially reduces the threat of domestic criminal prosecution under the War Crimes Act”.
So it seems even a couple of years ago the Bush Gang were giving serious thought as to how to avoid future criminal prosecution for malfeasance, no matter how that might cripple the “War on Terror”. I guess they learned how important it was to cover their arses after so many of them were prosecuted in the 1980s.
Watching them now desperately (and badly) lying to save their arses is a lesson in political desperation. Rumsfeld (and, by implication, Bush) have been caught now several times lying about how and when they first “knew” that torture was being used in interrogations in Iraq, and before that. Rumsfeld has said he was briefed first in January/February 2004, and Bush’s sock puppet Scott McClellan said those early months of 2004 was when Bush was first informed. However, now even Colin Powell has come out and verified the Red Cross’s statements that they had been warning “the highest levels” of the Bush Gang of ongoing torture since the middle of 2003.
We kept the president informed of the concerns that were raised by the ICRC and other international organizations as part of my regular briefings of the president, and advised him that we had to follow these issues” … A Powell aide said he couldn’t pinpoint when the secretary first spoke with Bush about detainees in Iraq but said Powell told the president of receiving complaints about detainees generally – in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, “at various times throughout this period – the last year or more.”
[There was] an elaborate, all-inclusive chain of command in this scandal. Bush knew about it. Rumsfeld ordered it. His undersecretary of defense for intelligence, Steven Cambone, administered it. Cambone’s deputy, Lt. Gen. William Boykin, instructed Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, who had been executing the program involving al-Qaida suspects at Guantanamo, to go do the same at Abu Ghraib. Miller told Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, who was in charge of the 800th Military Brigade, that the prison would now be dedicated to gathering intelligence. Douglas Feith, the undersecretary of defense for policy, also seems to have had a hand in this sequence, as did William Haynes, the Pentagon’s general counsel. Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, learned about the improper interrogationsfrom the International Committee of the Red Cross, if not from anyone elsebut said or did nothing about it for two months, until it was clear that photographs were coming out.
Related
