I’m much more interested in demanding that McCain release his health records.

You wouldn’t demand that he also release his mental health records, would you dear friend?

Yoo’s just following the official Bush/Cheney doctrine concering damn pieces of paper.

Maybe it stems originally from Dubya’s childhood abhorrence of the written word — which he couldn’t read. Maybe he wants a world without words, so he won’t appear so stupid.

Isn’t it fascinating that Yoo can pick and choose which peoples and/or places the Geneva Conventions apply to…?
reply

If it was a regular army instead of civilian insurgents we were fighting, then they would simply redefine the word ‘uniform’ to something else, so they could say the people opposing us weren’t due GC rights. It’s all just word mangling, so they can essentially say, “Stop us! Or, shut up.”

Why they’re doing it is as important. Why *are* they doing it? What’s their point? What’s to be gained?

I got an email today from Robt Wexler asking us to submit questions for him to ask Petraeus to contact@wexlerforcongress.com
———————————————————
Dear ***,

As President Bush stubbornly refuses to change course in Iraq, it grows increasingly frustrating for those of us who have been loudly demanding a withdrawal. I know you share my frustration. Every day, I receive letters and emails from patriotic Americans who want to – somehow – personally contribute to a solution.

Now it is your turn.

Next week, General Petraeus – the architect of the failed surge policy and our chief military leader in Iraq – will be testifying before the Committee on Foreign Affairs.

For too long the Bush Administration has been in a bubble – hiding from the truth and avoiding tough questions from outraged American citizens. This time I am turning the oversight powers of Congress over to you.

I want you to be the ones asking the questions to General Petraus.

Write me back with a short reply and tell me what – specifically – you would like me to ask. Please include your first name as well as your city and state.

I will choose the best two questions and ask them to General Petraeus this Wednesday. You will be able to watch his answers directly on C-Span.

Please consider submitting a question. You already work so hard to bring accountability to this Administration and to bring our troops home from Iraq. I hope this provides you another opportunity for us to collaborate and directly influence the national dialogue.

Please keep your questions short and focused.

I look forward to your response, and thank you for participating directly in our democracy.

Congressman Robert Wexler
http://www.wexlerforcongress.com

That this was coming from the OLC at DOJ makes my flesh crawl. But what they did with this after they got in in writing is even worse. I’m going to be having nightmares for weeks…again. To say I loathe this doesn’t come close to how disgusting this is, but you know what I’m saying…it’s beyond my ability to describe my reaction to this, but it’s at a visceral, gut level. And most of it isn’t so much new factual information, it’s more the “hows and whys” that get filled in a bit at the edges that are making it even worse.

(((Peanut)))

(((Puppy)))

(((((PJ)))))

Certainly, by the time of the August 2002 generic torture memo, we had detainees at GITMO since January 2002 and had Zubaydah blacksited for months and others as well. By September of 2002, Larry Thompson was signing off on sending Maher Arar for Syrian torture.

By January of 2002 and/or August of 2002 or March of 2003 – whenever you pick a point, the likelihood that the President had committed war crimes and needed cover exists at each point, with the how many and how much as the only big questions. So to cover a few war crimes by Bush and the highest officials, would they have quibbled at implementing policies that would degrade the whole military and intelligence community and force the nation to stake a “legal claim” to the mantle of State Sponsor of Global Torture?

I know what I think.

Within the last couple of weeks, 60 Minutes have finally gotten around to running a piece on the Kurnaz case. But when was it that we, as a nation, learned about the Kurnaz kidnapping, abuse, coverups, and continued detentions? Back in 2005 and never would have learned any of what we did without habeas and the courts.

Levin, McCain, Clinton, Warner – on the Senate armed services committee and what did they do or say to challenge the constant media drumbeat that only the “worst of the worst” were at GITMO? Well, McCain and Warner added to it, Levin co-sponsored making GITMO a habeas free zone, and Clinton was waging war on flag burning. Kids 11 years old sold to GITMO – and no one says a word. Bipolar London chefs disappeared to GITMO and put for YEARS into solitary – no one says a word.

A case like Kurnaz – where plenty of words were said by the intelligence communities of three countries – hundreds of pages of words – ALL (with the exception of one bizarre memo that relied in part on the fact that Kurnaz prayed during the pledge of allegiance or some such idiocy) EXCULPATORY and all “classified” to prevent use to free Kurnaz.

The reason? It’s the flaw that always existed with the approach by Yoo and Gonzales and Addington, et al. Even if you accepted and believed their theory completely, it only “worked” to avoid liability if someone really was al-Qaeda. This is a point Powell had raised right at the beginning, that you at least needed a fair hearing process before you divested people of GC protections. That was not done.

So as people who were not even combatants, much less “unlawful enemy combatants” much less members of al-Qaeda, were sold to the US in human trafficking transactions, and then disappeared out of country, by the time their feet hit GITMO shores you had a completed war crime and an act (the transport of protected persons out of country) that the Geneva Conventions themselves internally recognize as being a severe breach – - which pretty much means the War Crimes Act as domestic law is in play as well.

This is the point that is continuously overlooked in the analysis of what is going on at GITMO and has gone on there. The instant anyone at GITMO would have a hearing that determines they were NOT an unlawful enemy combatant when they were purchased/shipped/kidnapped to GITMO – - you have a prima facie completed war crime. And one that NOTHING in ANY of the memos protects against. This is where the pretense gets stripped.

Once cases started going to stack up in the civilian courts, they decided to put together the ludicrous “Combatant Status Review Tribunals” at GITMO (following Powell’s original advice and the spirit of the Conventions, years late and without any concern abou that “fair” part). Of the many many many many problems with those hearings, the primary one has always been that any determination by the CSRTs that someone was not an unlawful enemy combatant when they were purchased/shipped/kidnapped is absolutely the same as a finding that every person involved with those purchases/shipments/kidnaps and the interrogations and detentions and abuses thereafter were war criminals.

A finding by a CSRT that someone was not an unlawful enemy combatant was a finding that the CIC, George Bush, was a war criminal.

And so there never were any CSRT findings to that effect that were allowed to stand. This is why in the few cases where an Officer stood tall and refused to find unlawful enemy combatant status, they kept redoing the tribunals until they got the answer they wanted. This is the very basic point that seems to have escaped almost all comment. Even so, one of the big GITMO cheerleaders, way back when the Kurnaz case finally came to light (by aggressive lawyering that did not accept the Yoo/Addington & Posner/Goldsmith approaches), some of the very people who had pushed against any judicial review, like Doug Kmiec, said things like this:

Douglas Kmiec, a law professor at Pepperdine University who supports the tribunal process, said the lack of evidence against Kurnaz is “very troubling” and should prompt a military review of this particular tribunal.

“Failing to do that would undercut the argument that the military, in times of war, is capable of policing itself,” he said.

Did that review ever happen? Of course not. So did Kmiec then come out strongly against the DTA suspension of habeas at GITMO and the MCA suspension of habeas worldwide? Well, no, notsomuch.

But more importantly – where were the Dem voices, from Intel and Judiciary and Armed Services committees, hammering over and over on the facts of child purchases and royal screw ups at GITMO? Nowhere to be found. Read the forward to Dodd’s book on his father’s Nuremberg letters and you’ll find a description of the interactions with Harry Reid prior to the MCA vote. Then you won’t be surprised that I am a little underenthusiastic at the thought that we can be lucky enough in the elections to send more Harry Reids to Congress.

In any event, you bet Graham played the situation like a fiddle, because there were a lot of war crimes that were prima facie and right there in front of the world. Among other things, the MCA went back and in addition to granting immunity for abuse and depravity, and encouragement for future coverups and depravity, it “fixed” the little issue of “what about the people who were not unlawful enemy combatants”

How did if fix that problem?

It included an irrebutable presumption that if a CSRT had found someone to be an enemy combatant, they were one.