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Thursday, September 7, 2006 |
Get Out of Geneva Free Card. Reading through Bush’s detention bill it seems to do two things with regards to the Geneva Convetions. A) Commit the U.S. to following Article 3 — except for those parts we don’t like. And B) Removing any judicial accountability for not following even the other parts, so fuck you.
Page 79 says the administration…
…shall fully satisfy United States obligations with respect to the standards for detention and treatment established by section 1 of common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, with the exception of the obligations imposed by subsections 1(b) and 1(d) of such Article.
Basically we’d be exempting ourselves from two things: 1(d) isn’t surprising, as it deals with regularly constituted tribunals. It basically gives the administration the go ahead to try and execute people with Bush’s ad hoc military courts.
The exemption from the requirement of 1(b) is more curious. Let’s go to the Geneva Convention Article 3:
1(b) Taking of hostages
Again, I’m no lawyer, but WTF? Is this limited to a reading in which enemy combattants themselves would be the “hostages”? Or are we now saying we’d stoop to kidnapping Osama’s grandma to gain some leverage over our terrorist foe? Seems dangerously broad to me. Any lawyers out there want to weigh in?
[Rolling Stone National Affairs Daily]
2:19:12 PM 
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A Sudden Sense of Urgency
The New York Times | Editorial
Thursday 07 September 2006
Two months before a Congressional election in which voters are expressing serious doubts about the Republicans' handling of national security, President Bush finally has some real terrorists in Guantánamo Bay.
Mr. Bush admitted yesterday that the Central Intelligence Agency has been secretly holding prisoners and said he was transferring 14 to Guantánamo Bay, including some believed to have been behind the 9/11 attacks. He said he was informing the Red Cross about the prisoners, placing them under the Geneva Conventions, and asking that Congress - right now - create military tribunals to try them.
Those are just the right steps. If Guantánamo Bay has any purpose, it is for men like Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Ramzi bin al-Shibh, considered key players in 9/11. They should go on trial. If convicted, they should be locked up for life.
But Mr. Bush's urgency was phony, driven by the Supreme Court's ruling, not principle. This should all have happened long ago. If the White House had not wanted to place terror suspects beyond the reach of the law, all 14 of these men could have been tried by now, and America's reputation would have been spared some grievous damage. And there would be no need for Congress to rush through legislation if the White House had not stymied all of its attempts to do just that before.
The nation needs laws governing Guantánamo Bay, not just for the 14 new prisoners, but also for many others who have been there for years without due process, and who may have done no wrong.
Last month, for example, The Washington Post wrote about some of the first arrivals at Guantánamo Bay in 2002: six men, born in Algeria but living in Bosnia, accused of plotting to attack the United States Embassy in Sarajevo. Two years after their capture, Bosnian officials exonerated them. Last year, the Bosnian prime minister asked Washington to release them. But The Post said the administration has decided the men will never be returned to Bosnia, only to Algeria, and then only if they are confined or kept under close watch. Even the Algerian government won't go along with that.
Mr. Bush could have prevented this sort of miscarriage of justice if he had not insisted on creating his own system of military tribunals, which the Supreme Court ruled illegal. Even now, the legislation he is proposing to handle Guantánamo prisoners would undermine key principles of justice. It would permit the use of evidence obtained through coercion, along with hearsay evidence, and evidence that is kept secret from the accused. The military's top lawyers have all publicly opposed these provisions.
Mr. Bush also wants to rewrite American law to create a glaring exception to the Geneva Conventions, to give ex post facto approval to abusive interrogation methods, and to bar legal challenges to the new system.
Some of the most influential Republican voices on military affairs, Senators John Warner, John McCain and Lindsey Graham, are sponsoring a more sensible bill that would bar the use of coerced testimony and secret evidence. Members of this Congress have a nasty habit of caving in to the White House on national security, and there's a looming election, but it is vital that they stick to their principles this time.
11:21:35 AM
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This is What Democracy Looks Like? Iraqi Govt Shutters Arab Satellite Station. 
AP is reporting today: BAGHDAD, Iraq - The Iraqi government on Thursday ordered Arabic satellite network Al-Arabiya to shut down its Baghdad operations for one month, state television reported. Al-Arabiya said Iraqi police later arrived at its offices to enforce the order. ... Al-Arabiya, which is based in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, at first said its headquarters had not yet been informed of a ban, but later said on live television that police had arrived at its Baghdad offices to close its operations down. The order apparently was issued by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's Cabinet. Al Maliki's office said AA put out news reports that "capitalize on the footage of victims of terrorist attacks," and called on media outlets to "respect the dignity of human beings and not to fall in the trap set up by terrorist groups who want to petrify the Iraqi people." (Didn't John Ashcroft say something similar about US media a few years back...?) Recall, the Iraqi government shut down the Baghdad news office of Al-Jazeera in August 2004. It remains closed. In tangentially related news, Al Arabiya is running a two-week training course for its correspondents in a drive to raise the standards of media professionalism in the region. Local Al Arabiya correspondents, as well as redional staff from Morocco, Sudan and Iraq will be taken through training sessions on subjects such as Arabic language and chief editing. [MotherJones.com | MoJo Blog - Social Issues and Political Commentary]
11:00:21 AM
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Rachel Sklar: Broder, Hitchens, Frum, All Of Yous! There Is More To Plamegate Than Armitage. Today, the Washington Post's David Broder joins the crowing media types claiming that the revelation that Richard Armitage was Robert Novak's Plamegate source exculpates everyone else involved.
IT DOESN'T. In fact, it barely has anything to do with it!
Fact: Karl Rove leaked Joe Wilson's wife's identity to Matt Cooper BEFORE Novak published his column.
Fact: Scooter Libby leaked Joe Wilson's wife's identity to Judith Miller BEFORE Novak published his column.
Yet in his column in Canada's National Post this past weekend, "The Washington Scandal That Wasn't," David Frum claims that the confirmation of Armitage's identity lays the matter to rest with "an anti-climactic splat" — yet doesn't even mention what was leaked to Cooper and Miller. Christopher Hitchens, who wrote in July that Novak's revelations "exonerated the Bushies" and just a week or so ago that the Armitage-as-leak news proved that there was no "government-sponsored vendetta" against Wilson — yet doesn't even mention what was leaked to Cooper and Miller. Now today, David Broder wags a finger at the press for going to town on Rove, saying that since the original leak came from Armitage, it could not have been "political payback against Wilson by a White House that wanted to shift the public focus from the Iraq War to Wilson's motives." Yet he fails to account for the fact that Rove and Libby leaked to Cooper and Miller before Novak published a word.
It is absolutely true that if Armitage were a huge neocon hawk, the revelation that he was the original leak would bolster the theory of a high-level conspiracy to smear Joe Wilson. But the converse is not. The fact that the leak turned out to be an innocent lip-slip from an administration dove only accounts for the motives of one leaker: Armitage! What it does not account for is the fact that, thanks to Murray Waas, we know that Bush directed Cheney to go after Joe Wilson on his bogus WMD allegations. We also know that Cheney directed Libby to leak a classified CIA document to the press in the hopes of undermining Wilson's credibility and claims. In short, we know there was a concentrated effort on the part of the administration to counter Wilson's claims; I'd say that's reasonable grounds to infer that Rove and Libby may have had an agenda in leaking Plame's name to the press (not to mention that Rove didn't come clean about his role in the saga until Cooper was almost in leg irons, and Scooter Libby let Judy Miller sit in jail for 85 days before permitting her to divulge his name. When high-level government officials have something to hide about controversial, incriminating events, I'd say it's the media's responsibility to examine the evidence — and the conclusions it supports.
Conservatives like to trumpet the fact that Fitgerald found that no crime was committed. But that is a separate matter from whether or not there was a campaign afoot to smear Joe Wilson, and whether that motivated the revelation of his wife's identity by at least TWO high-level sources who weren't Armitage.
So Armitage was Novak's source. Big deal. That doesn't change what transpired between Rove and Cooper, Libby and Miller, Bush and Cheney, Cheney and Libby — a fact which has been left unmentioned by the likes of Hitchens, Frum, and Broder. I'd be perfectly willing to consider their arguments regarding all aspects of Plamegate — if only they stopped ignoring mine.
Hat Tip: Joe Scarborough, for giving me a reason to think about all this last week. Mr. Hitchens, I look forward to the rematch.
 [The Huffington Post | Full Blog Feed]
10:58:53 AM
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© Copyright 2006 Patricia Thurston.
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