Bringing this thread back up as we are approaching the anniversary of the late Pope's admonishing Bush re: Iraq.
Also came upon the following
here [
counterpunch.org] :
The Bush administration hasn't tried very hard to keep its torture-by-proxy program a secret. That's because the administration's torture lawyers, such as John Yoo, former deputy to Alberto Gonzales and now a law professor at Berkeley, argue that the administration is free to breach international and domestic laws in its pursuit of suspected terrorists. While working for the Bush administration, Yoo drafted a legal memo, which set the framework for the rendition program. He argued that the US was not bound by the Geneva Accords (or US prohibitions on torture) in its pursuit of al-Qaeda members or Taliban soldiers because Afghanistan was "a failed state" and therefore not subject to the protections of the anti-torture laws. The detainees were slotted into a newly created category called "illegal enemy combatants," a legal rubric which treated them as subhumans lacking all basic human rights.
"Why is it so hard for people to understand that there is a category of behavior not covered by the legal system?" Yoo proclaimed. "Historically, there were people so bad that they were not given protection of the laws. There were no specific provisions for their trial, or imprisonment. If you were an illegal combatant, you didn't deserve the protection of the laws of war."
Of course, in the absence of a trial, who is to determine if the people detained as "illegal combatants" are either "illegal" or even "combatants"?
Even more brazenly, Yoo contends that the Bush administration is free to ignore US laws against torture.
"Congress doesn't have the power to tie the hands of the President in regard to torture as an interrogation technique," said Yoo. "It's the core of the Commander-in-Chief function. Congress can't prevent the president from ordering torture."
Yoo claims that if Congress has a problem with Bush flouting its laws, the solution is simple: impeachment. He also argued that the US public had its shot at repudiating Bush's detention and torture program and instead endorsed it. "The issue is dying out," Yoo told the New Yorker magazine. It "has had its referendum."
As in so many cases with the Bush administration, it appears that Dick Cheney himself gave the greenlight for the kidnapping and torture scenario. Cheney even dropped a public hint that the Bush administration was going deal savagely with suspected terrorists. During an interview on Meet the Press, a week after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Cheney said that the administration wasn't going to shackle itself to conventional methods in tracking down suspected terrorists. "A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies, if we're going to be successful", Cheney said. "That's the world these folks operate in. And so it's going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective. We may have to work through, sort of, the dark side."
Welcome to the dark ages.
