Making it legal

GW Bush has proposed new legislation that would allow more methods of interrogation to be used by the USA on prisoners – methods including sleep deprivation and exposure to extreme heat and cold. These, let’s remember, are methods that were rejected by the US military on the very same day as Bush proposed this legislation. Worse even than this, other new legislation is already explicitly weaseling out of Geneva Convention restrictions on “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment” by defining it much more narrowly as treatment that “shocks the conscience”. Leaving undefined, of course, whose conscience is to be shocked.

I often hear that the Geneva Conventions don’t bind the USA in this instance, but I’ve yet to hear an argument that’s even vaguely logical to defend this position. There’s nothing new in the current situation, apart from a new paranoia and hysteria that’s sweeping the USA and (to a lesser extent) Europe. There’s nothing new about terrorists attacking a stronger enemy. There’s nothing new about a strong country invading a weak one. The only thing that is new is a strong country (indeed, the strongest country of all) declaring that it need no longer abide by the legal and moral standards that bind every other country in the world.

Interrogation Methods Rejected by Military Win Bush’s Support
By ADAM LIPTAK
Published: September 8, 2006
Many of the harsh interrogation techniques repudiated by the Pentagon on Wednesday would be made lawful by legislation put forward the same day by the Bush administration. And the courts would be forbidden from intervening.
The proposal is in the last 10 pages of an 86-page bill devoted mostly to military commissions, and it is a tangled mix of cross-references and pregnant omissions.
But legal experts say it adds up to an apparently unique interpretation of the Geneva Conventions, one that could allow C.I.A. operatives and others to use many of the very techniques disavowed by the Pentagon, including stress positions, sleep deprivation and extreme temperatures…
The proposed legislation, said Peter S. Margulies, a law professor at Roger Williams University, “seems to be trying to surgically remove from our compliance with Geneva the section of Common Article 3 that deals with humiliating and degrading treatment.”...
Dean Koh said the administration’s new interpretation of the Geneva Conventions would further isolate the United States from the rest of the world.
“Making U.S. ratification of Common Article 3 narrower and more conditional than everyone else’s,” he said, “by its very nature suggests that we are not prepared to make the same commitment that every other nation has made.”

(Thanks to Mike at WorD for the tip.)

pax et bonum

Article posted at 09:48am on 08 September 2006
Category: Politics, General