Outer Space

One of the repercussions of the Hamden decision was that the Bush administration has relented on Geneva Conventions;

WASHINGTON - The Bush administration, called to account by Congress after the Supreme Court blocked military tribunals, said Tuesday all detainees at Guantanamo Bay and in U.S. military custody everywhere are entitled to protections under the Geneva Conventions.

This raises an obvious question, right off the bat. If the prisoners are now entitled to basic human rights prohibiting torture, and simple murder - what does that say about the official government policy prior to today?

For example..



That was a prisoner murdered by the CIA at Abu Ghraib, link:

Now, I realize that I tend to think a lot more logically than most people by nature of my profession, but it doesn't take a systems engineer to realize that if they have decided to stop torturing and killing prisoners by official government decree TODAY - that means that yesterday they were war criminals.

In fact, this fascinating article from Newsweek shows that the administration went out of their way to find a way to torture and kill anyone they choose.

White House hard-liners, led by Vice President Dick Cheney and his uncompromising lawyer, David Addington, made it clear that there was only one acceptable answer. One day, Bowker recalls, a colleague explained the goal: to "find the legal equivalent of outer space" -- a "lawless" universe. As Bowker understood it, the idea was to create a system where detainees would have no legal rights and U.S courts would have no power to intervene.

Never before in the history of the United States has it been the official policy to create a zone where anything goes, and prisoners had no rights what-so-ever. That concept is totally antithetical to American tradition, and it is indeed a war crime.

Still, all these neoconservatives think we should do anything we can to kill Islamic terrorists, even if that means executing them summarily while in captivity. The neocons believe that because the "terrorists" want to kill us, we are obligated to exterminate them on the battlefield and off regardless of any other consideration - even innocence.

I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around why they think that way. It probably has a lot to do with fearful personalities, and the visceral adrenaline rush of violence. In short, it's sadistic, and neocons are pretty sadistic people. And quite anti-American I might add.

Glenn Greenwald has a very good essay describing the differences between conservatives, neo-conservatives, and liberals, here: I highly recommend it.

"Even those terrorists captured in Afghanistan ... are entitled to the fundamental humane treatment standards of ... the Geneva Conventions," William Howard Taft IV, the State Department legal counselor and Bowker's boss, wrote in a Jan. 23, 2002, memo obtained by NEWSWEEK. In particular, Taft argued, the United States has always followed one provision of the Geneva Conventions—known as Common Article 3—which "provides the minimal standards" of treatment that even "terrorists captured in Afghanistan" deserve.

"This has opened up a can of worms," says Sen. Lindsay Graham, a South Carolina Republican. "You could have a situation if we don't bring some restraint where anybody who has done anything to an Al Qaeda suspect that's harsh could be prosecuted." Bowker says he and other State Department lawyers specifically warned about just such a scenario during the early debates. "The implications of this—for potentially being arrested and tried in other countries—is certainly a little scary," says Ted Olson, the former solicitor general.

So, who should be tried? Should it be the ones who set the policy, or the ones who carried it out?