Republicans Backbenchers Beat Bush, Leadership on Detainees

An alliance of prominent Republican Senators, Colin Powell, and Congressional Democrats have won the first round in a battle with President Bush and the Republican Congressional leadership over the treatment of suspected terrorist detainees. A Senate committee, in a bipartisan rebuff to President George W. Bush, approved military tribunal legislation that would give more legal protection to suspected terrorists than ...

Torturing Prisoners and Practical Effects

Marc Danziger takes down the NYT editorial board for making the specious argument, "The Geneva Conventions protect Americans. If this country changes the rules, it’s changing the rules for Americans taken prisoner abroad. That is far too high a price to pay so this administration can hang on to its misbegotten policies." After providing a litany of examples of American soldiers ...

Bush Considers Weakening War Crimes Act

The Bush administration is considering li The Bush administration has drafted amendments to a war crimes law that would eliminate the risk of prosecution for political appointees, CIA officers and former military personnel for humiliating or degrading war prisoners, according to U.S. officials and a copy of the amendments. Officials say the amendments would alter a U.S. law passed in the ...

CIA Intelink Blogger Fired

Dana Priest reports that a government contractor who blogged on the CIA's Top Secret Intelink has been fired. Christine Axsmith, a software contractor for the CIA, considered her blog a success within the select circle of people who could actually access it. Only people with top-secret security clearances could read her musings, which were posted on Intelink, the intelligence community's ...

Welcome To “Genevaland”

It's not such a wonderful place: At a minimum, the Bush Administration should have thought carefully about Hamdan and interpreted it as narrowly as possible. Instead, Mr. England's memo interprets the ruling in the broadest way possible, applying the standards of Common Article 3 to all "DoD orders, policies, directives, execute orders and doctrine." As a matter of law, every other ...

On the Humane Treatment of Prisoners

Via Andrew Sullivan, I happened to stumble across this post which is, apparently, not a joke. In reaction to the recent brutal murders of PFCs Menchaca and Tucker, the author appears to have directed his anger not at the perpetrators, which would be logical, but rather the Supreme Court, for demanding that the United States government follow the law. Our ...

BREAKING: New Pentagon Memo Gives All Detainees Geneva Protections

Via Breitbart/AP: The Bush administration said Tuesday that all detainees held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and in U.S. military custody everywhere are entitled to protections under the Geneva Conventions. White House spokesman Tony Snow said the policy, outlined in a new Defense Department memo, reflects the recent 5-3 Supreme Court decision blocking military tribunals set up by President Bush. That decision ...

Is Bush A War Criminal?

Andrew Sullivan answers his own rhetorical question: That question has troubled me for quite a while. The Hamdan decision certainly suggests that, by ignoring the Geneva Conventions even in Guantanamo (let alone in Iraq), a war crime has been committed. And in the military, the command structure insists that superiors are held accountable. I've been saying this for a long ...

John Yoo On Hamdan

Short and sweet: By putting on hold military commissions to try terrorists for war crimes, five Supreme Court justices have made the legal system part of the problem, rather than part of the solution to the challenges of the war on terrorism. They tossed aside centuries of American history, judicial decisions of long standing, and a December 2005 law ordering them ...

Bush Vows to Pursue Detainee War Trials

President Bush said he will press Congress for a law specifically authorizing military tribunals for Guantanamo Bay detainees in response to today's Supreme Court ruling. After a Supreme Court decision overruling war crimes trials for Guantanamo Bay detainees, President Bush suggested Thursday he would seek Congress' approval to proceed with trying terrorism suspects before military tribunals. "To the extent that there ...