← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · kminta
Thread ID: 14104 | Posts: 4 | Started: 2004-06-08
2004-06-08 23:41 | User Profile
[I]Ah, the "media strategies at time of war".[/I]
[I]All of a sudden, the single most powerful newspaper in America, the one most in favor of Israel and Zionism, one that is wholly controlled by Jews, but more especially the one that contributed the most toward "selling the public" on the idea that it was [B]unavoidably necessary and justified[/B] that President Bush order the immediate invasion of Iraq for the reasons given, has turned.[/I]
[I]This paper went above and beyond its duty to [B]report[/B] the news, by allowing some of its reporters and editors to [B]invent and/or embellish[/B] the news, to fuel-up the public paranoia and hysteria to the point that [B]most[/B] Americans were praising, thanking and agreeing with Bush; the poorest excuse for a leader who had ever stolen an election, that the invasion of Iraq was a matter of National [B]Defence[/B] against an [B]imminent threat of attack by a heavily-armed enemy[/B].[/I]
[I]But now, with the Presidential Election only months away, with a part-Jewish Democrat leading Bush in the popularity polls, with Iraq having turned into more an un-winnable quagmire than Vietnam, with no WMD's having been found in the whole of Iraq, with no connection having been confirmed between Iraq and the World Trade Center destruction and/or "the Muslim Terrorists," with Saddam Hussein in American custody and both of his sons assassinated, with the American body-count nearing the first thousand and very many more having been horribly maimed, with public-opinion in America and world-wide having turned against Bush, [B]against[/B] America, [B]against[/B] the Mid-East Wars and [B]against Israel[/B], and with the New York Times having been [B]dragged through the mud[/B] on true charges of manipulating the news, this [B]once-paragon of integrity[/B] has started on a campaign of [B]truth-telling and finger-pointing[/B], as first exemplified by its [B]blaming the Pentagon[/B] as the source of the false news that it had splashed all over its front pages, and as now exemplified by the below article which [B]blames Bush[/B] for pre-exploring, approving and ordering the [B]inhumane torture of Arab prisoners by Israeli-taught methods[/B].[/I]
[B][URL=http://www.nytimes.com/auth/login?URI=http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/08/politics/08ABUS.html]Lawyers Decided Bans on Torture Didn't Bind Bush[/URL][/B] By NEIL A. LEWIS and ERIC SCHMITT
WASHINGTON, June 7 ââ¬â 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.
2004-06-08 23:48 | User Profile
kminta,
A few years back, I never thought I see our government trying to get authority to torture people and build Gulags.
2004-06-09 00:44 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Faust] A few years back, I never thought I see our government trying to get authority to torture people and build Gulags.[/QUOTE]
Yes.
'It couldnôt happen here.', had probably been the attitude of most of us in the West.
2004-06-09 01:30 | User Profile
I read some pretty nasty columns by Maureen Dowd on Bush so, I'm not sure the NYT was ever solidly behind Bush. But it does have some neocons like Safire.
One idea that occurs to me is that Bush has bungled Iraq so bad that even he knows we have to get out now. Therefore the zionists see their best chance to keep meddling with the middle-east in John Kerry's plan to bring in the UN. I don't have anythiing to back this up; just a gut feeling.