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| 2007/7/10-14 [Politics/Domestic/President/Bush] UID:47241 Activity:moderate |
7/1- When our bureaucrats fuck up, they get promoted, are rewarded with the
Congressional Medal of Freedom, or have their sentences commuted.
In Communist China...they get executed.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070710/ap_on_re_as/china_tainted_products
\_ Yes, let's emulate the Chinese way of doing things where they ignore
tremendous levels of corruption and make an example out of someone
every so often instead of having a real legal system and cleaning
up their act in a day to day way. Woot random justice!
\_ No in China one bureaucrat who went too far got executed as
a scapegoat. Let me guess, you think the Abu Ghraib torture
scandal was just a few bad apples?
\_ You have evidence to the contrary? -not op
\_ There's a lot of evidence that the people at the bottom
of the totem pole on staff at Abu Ghraib did not just
magically wake up one morning and start torturing
detainees. Bush/Bush's advisors such as Gonzalez,
Yoo and David Addington put together a plan to make
torturing info out detainees legal, and it trickled
down from there. There is reams and reams of evidence.
dunno why people aren't raiding the white house with
pitchforks now.
\_ It is one thing for Gonzalez to publish a paper. It
requires actual proof if you want to claim that Bush, etc
were responsible and this wasn't just a case of a few
bad apples. The fact that such a small number of people
were involved compared to how many prisoners there are
strongly implies the bad apple theory.
\_ All the "proof" is classified and Bush refuses to
hand it over to Congress. Hence the need for
impeachment hearings. Where was your demand for
proof in the run-up to the Gulf War? Doesn't a
desire to start a war require some "proof" as well?
\_ how many more bad apples at the top do you want? I
have read articles about how Addington and Gonzalez
and Yoo put together legal briefs giving the
president infinite power to torture people. This
is not a secret. How many more 'bad apples' at the
freakin' top do you want? Why are the minions at
the bottom serving prison sentences and the guys
who ordered them to do it are walking free? Fuck.
\_ I'll say it slowly this time: Writing a legal
brief is not the same as having sent orders down
the line to the 2 dumb shits who abused those
guys at AG. "Fuck." Again: No one ordered them
to abuse prisoners. There is no evidence of such
a thing and no one outside the realms of dailykos
thinks so. If you wanted to argue that the two
knuckleheads actually read the Gonzalez brief and
on that basis decided it was a good idea to
abuse and humiliate some prisoners you might
have something, except both are too stupid to
read or understand VCR instructions much less a
legal brief.
\_ Many more were tortured in Afghanistan and in
extrodanary rendition cases, where the CIA turned over
people to other governments to torure them. It wasn't
just a few prisoners, it was systematic.
\_ Which is a totally different thing than what we've
been talking about. That was clearly a government
sanctioned policy. Two idiots at AG taking it upon
themselves to abuse prisoners was clearly not. The
former is about trying to get information out of
them, the latter is just abuse and not useful to
anyone. You can see the difference, yes?
\_ all evidence says these "few bad apples" are those belongs to
the white house.
\_ What evidence?
\_ You haven't read Sy Hersh's New Yorker series?
Start here:
http://www.csua.org/u/j49
\_ Not yet but I will now, thanks for the link.
\_ Ok, I read the whole thing. The only line in the
entire thing that even refers to anyone above the
local commander, Karpinski is this:
"Human Rights Watch complained to Secretary of
Defense Donald Rumsfeld that civilians in Iraq
remained in custody month after month with no
charges brought against them."
This is light years away from "Bush, etc, were aware
and directly responsible for abuses taking place at
Abu Graib. This was not just a 'few bad apples'".
Maybe you have something that actually addresses that
issue directly? Ya know... evidence of White House
knowledge and complicity?
\_ Fair enough, but this article does indicate that
\_ Fair enough, but that article does indicate that
quite a ways up the chain of command, they were
aware of abuses. Here is something that claims to
draw the connection:
http://www.csua.org/u/j4p (salon)
and another Hersh article where the connection
between the "torture memos" and Abu Gharib.
There is no doubt that Yoo and gang authorized
torture from the top. The only debate is on
whether this rule was applied in Iraq or not.
http://www.csua.org/u/j4q
\_ Nah, sorry, I don't have time to read endless
links. You had your shot. The next time this
comes up post your best link first, not four
pages of junk I read closely looking for your
point which didn't exist.
\_ "Look, Sy Hersh is the closest thing American
journalism has to a terrorist, frankly." -Perle
\_ Anyone Richard Perle hates cant be all bad.
\_ The policy came from the top:
http://zfacts.com/p/100.html
\_ Sorry, anything that opens calling people 'neocons' has
a clear bias and is not worth reading. I stopped on the
first line. If you have something factual that at least
pretends to be unbiased I'll happily read it. I don't
accept dailykos or freeper crap. Thanks.
\_ read this . fun stuff
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/07/03/060703fa_fact1
\_ You know that there is a large number of people
who call *themselves* neocons, right? Are you willing
to read the Weekly Standard?
\_ Done in an entirely different context not as a slur.
But I know you knew that, right? Post real links
from sites without such an giant axe to grind and
I'll happily read and respond to them and if they
reveal something I was unaware of I'm open to
changing my mind on this or any other topic but not
from a dailykos/freeper quality crap site. |
| 5/26 |
|
| news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070710/ap_on_re_as/china_tainted_products AP China executes ex-food and drug chief By ALEXA OLESEN, Associated Press Writer 16 minutes ago BEIJING - China executed the former head of its food and drug watchdog on Tuesday for approving untested medicine in exchange for cash, the strongest signal yet from Beijing that it is serious about tackling its product safety crisis. com During Zheng Xiaoyu's tenure from 1998 to 2005, the State Food and Drug Administration approved six medicines that turned out to be fake, and the drug-makers used falsified documents to apply for approvals, according to previous state media reports. His execution was confirmed by state television and the official Xinhua News Agency. "The few corrupt officials of the SFDA are the shame of the whole system and their scandals have revealed some very serious problems," agency spokeswoman Yan Jiangying said at a news conference held to highlight efforts to improve China's track record on food and drug safety. The government also assured athletes, coaches, officials, and others could count on safe meals at the 2008 Beijing Summer Games, and that food would be free of substances that could trigger a positive result in tests for banned performance enhancing drugs. Food safety authorities, meanwhile, promised to investigate a newspaper report that more than half of the water coolers in Beijing used counterfeit branded water. Yan was asked to comment on Zheng's sentence and that of his subordinate, Cao Wenzhuang, a former director of SFDA's drug registration department who was last week sentenced to death for accepting bribes and dereliction of duty. Cao was given a two-year reprieve, a ruling which is usually commuted to life in prison if the convict is deemed to have reformed. "We should seriously reflect and learn lessons from these cases," Yan said. Zheng, 63, was convicted of taking cash and gifts worth $832,000 when he was in charge of the State Food and Drug Administration. His death sentence was unusually heavy even for China, believed to carry out more court-ordered executions than all other nations combined, and indicates the leadership's determination to confront the country's dire product safety record. Last year, dozens of people died in Panama after taking medicine contaminated with diethylene glycol imported from China. Yan said she did not have any information about whether the Chinese manufacturer, Taixing Glycerin Factory, and the Chinese distributor, CNSC Fortune Way, had been punished. China admitted last month that it was the source of the deadly chemical that ended up in cough syrup and other treatments but insists the chemical was originally labeled as for industrial use only. Beijing blames the Panama traders who eventually bought the shipment for fraudulently relabeling it as medical-grade glycerin. Scandals over contaminated Chinese food exports have underscored chronic problems with adulterated ingredients and fake products in the domestic supply, raising questions of how well China can guarantee the purity of food for the Olympics. "All the procedures involving Olympic food, including production, processing, packaging, storing and transporting will be closely monitored," Sun Wenxu, an official with the State Administration for Industry and Commerce, told reporters Tuesday. A food safety official also promised an investigation into the Beijing Times newspaper report about water coolers, but noted that a May inspection of Beijing's drinking water products found more than 96 percent were safe. "Problems found with some individual cases cannot be interpreted to mean that the entire water industry has problems," Wu Jianping of the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine told a news conference. In North America earlier this year, pet food containing Chinese wheat gluten tainted with the chemical melamine was blamed for the deaths of dogs and cats. Since then, US authorities have turned away or recalled toxic fish, juice containing unsafe color additives and popular toy trains decorated with lead paint. Yan said the food and drug administration was working to strengthen its safety procedures. The administration has already announced a series of measures to tighten safety controls and closed factories where illegal chemicals or other problems were found. But Yan acknowledged that her agency's supervision of food and drug safety remains unsatisfactory and that it has been slow to tackle the problem. "China is a developing country and our supervision of food and drugs started quite late and our foundation for this work is weak, so we are not optimistic about the current food and drug safety situation," Yan said. Chinese officials have already said the country faces social unrest and a further tarnished image abroad unless it improves the quality and safety of its food and medicine. Last week, China's food safety watchdog said almost 20 percent of products made for domestic consumption were found to be substandard in the first half of 2007. China has also stepped up its inspections of imported products and said some US products are not safe. In the latest case, the official Xinhua News Agency reported Tuesday that a shipment of sugar-free drink mix from the United States had been rejected for having too much red dye. Zheng Xiaoyu, the former director of China's State Food and Drug Administration, is seen in a meeting of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) in Beijing in this March 4, 2003 photo. Zheng was executed Tuesday July 10, 2007, for approving untested medicine in exchange for cash, leading to the deaths of at least 10 people. The execution was the strongest signal yet from Beijing that it is serious about tackling its product safety crisis. The information contained in the AP News report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press. |
| www.csua.org/u/j49 -> www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/05/10/040510fa_fact Taguba, Antonio M (Major General) In the era of Saddam Hussein, Abu Ghraib, twenty miles west of Baghdad, was one of the world's most notorious prisons, with torture, weekly executions, and vile living conditions. As many as fifty thousand men and women--no accurate count is possible--were jammed into Abu Ghraib at one time, in twelve-by-twelve-foot cells that were little more than human holding pits. In the looting that followed the regime's collapse, last April, the huge prison complex, by then deserted, was stripped of everything that could be removed, including doors, windows, and bricks. The coalition authorities had the floors tiled, cells cleaned and repaired, and toilets, showers, and a new medical center added. Most of the prisoners, however--by the fall there were several thousand, including women and teen-agers--were civilians, many of whom had been picked up in random military sweeps and at highway checkpoints. They fell into three loosely defined categories: common criminals; security detainees suspected of "crimes against the coalition"; and a small number of suspected "high-value" leaders of the insurgency against the coalition forces. Last June, Janis Karpinski, an Army reserve brigadier general, was named commander of the 800th Military Police Brigade and put in charge of military prisons in Iraq. General Karpinski, the only female commander in the war zone, was an experienced operations and intelligence officer who had served with the Special Forces and in the 1991 Gulf War, but she had never run a prison system. Now she was in charge of three large jails, eight battalions, and thirty-four hundred Army reservists, most of whom, like her, had no training in handling prisoners. General Karpinski, who had wanted to be a soldier since she was five, is a business consultant in civilian life, and was enthusiastic about her new job. Petersburg Times, she said that, for many of the Iraqi inmates at Abu Ghraib, "living conditions now are better in prison than at home. At one point we were concerned that they wouldn't want to leave." A month later, General Karpinski was formally admonished and quietly suspended, and a major investigation into the Army's prison system, authorized by Lieutenant General Ricardo S Sanchez, the senior commander in Iraq, was under way. A fifty-three-page report, obtained by The New Yorker, written by Major General Antonio M Taguba and not meant for public release, was completed in late February. Its conclusions about the institutional failures of the Army prison system were devastating. Specifically, Taguba found that between October and December of 2003 there were numerous instances of "sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses" at Abu Ghraib. This systematic and illegal abuse of detainees, Taguba reported, was perpetrated by soldiers of the 372nd Military Police Company, and also by members of the American intelligence community. There was stunning evidence to support the allegations, Taguba added--"detailed witness statements and the discovery of extremely graphic photographic evidence." Photographs and videos taken by the soldiers as the abuses were happening were not included in his report, Taguba said, because of their "extremely sensitive nature." s taunting naked Iraqi prisoners who are forced to assume humiliating poses. Six suspects--Staff Sergeant Ivan L Frederick II, known as Chip, who was the senior enlisted man; and Private Jeremy Sivits--are now facing prosecution in Iraq, on charges that include conspiracy, dereliction of duty, cruelty toward prisoners, maltreatment, assault, and indecent acts. A seventh suspect, Private Lynndie England, was reassigned to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, after becoming pregnant. In one, Private England, a cigarette dangling from her mouth, is giving a jaunty thumbs-up sign and pointing at the genitals of a young Iraqi, who is naked except for a sandbag over his head, as he masturbates. Three other hooded and naked Iraqi prisoners are shown, hands reflexively crossed over their genitals. In another, England stands arm in arm with Specialist Graner; both are grinning and giving the thumbs-up behind a cluster of perhaps seven naked Iraqis, knees bent, piled clumsily on top of each other in a pyramid. There is another photograph of a cluster of naked prisoners, again piled in a pyramid. a woman soldier stands in front of him, bending over, and she, too, is smiling. Then, there is another cluster of hooded bodies, with a female soldier standing in front, taking photographs. Yet another photograph shows a kneeling, naked, unhooded male prisoner, head momentarily turned away from the camera, posed to make it appear that he is performing oral sex on another male prisoner, who is naked and hooded. Such dehumanization is unacceptable in any culture, but it is especially so in the Arab world. Homosexual acts are against Islamic law and it is humiliating for men to be naked in front of other men, Bernard Haykel, a professor of Middle Eastern studies at New York University, explained. "Being put on top of each other and forced to masturbate, being naked in front of each other--it's all a form of torture," Haykel said. COMING SOON A searchable index, with abstracts, back to 1925. newsletter sign-up The New Yorker This Week: Links to articles and Web-only features, delivered to your e-mail inbox. com The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached, or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of CondNet Inc. This Site looks and works best when viewed using browsers enabled with JavaScript 15 and CSS, such as Firefox 2+ or Internet Explorer 6+. |
| www.csua.org/u/j4p -> dir.salon.com/story/opinion/conason/2004/05/22/yoo/index.html Log in From John Ashcroft's Justice Department to Abu Ghraib The men behind the administration's decision to ignore and undermine the Geneva Conventions in Iraq. Geneva Conventions can be traced to John Ashcroft's Justice Department, where a top deputy to the attorney general drafted them during the months after 9/11. Conservative law professor John Yoo, who has since returned to teaching at the University of California at Berkeley's Boalt Hall law school, wrote or co-authored crucial memoranda that encouraged the Pentagon and the White House to deny traditional protections to prisoners of war and detainees. Although the original targets of those legal memos were the Taliban and al-Qaida prisoners in Guantnamo and Afghanistan, administration critics now believe that those same arguments and attitudes promoted tolerance of the brutal, coercive and illegal interrogation methods that recently have been exposed in Iraq. According to a knowledgeable source, Defense Department Undersecretary for Policy Douglas Feith first sought the assistance of the military's Judge Advocate General Corps in fashioning policies that evaded or diluted the Geneva protections. He then turned to the Justice Department, where Yoo -- then a deputy assistant attorney general in the department's office of legal counsel -- was assigned to formulate arguments to evade the restrictions of the Geneva Conventions. His rsum includes clerkships with US Court of Appeals Judge Lawrence Silberman and Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, two of the most ideological jurists on the federal bench. highest appointees in the Justice Department, Yoo is a longtime activist in the right-wing Federalist Society, which has bestowed upon him its Paul Bator award for legal scholarship and teaching. papers on such varied topics as the Supreme Court's Bush vs. Gore decision (which he supported, of course) and the Chemical Weapons Convention (which he strongly opposed). highest priority in the war on terrorism on the collection of timely intelligence. Administration policymakers and attorneys feared that function would be severely hampered by the Geneva Conventions and other restrictions on the use of coercive interrogation. To triumph against the terrorists, the administration became increasingly determined to oppose the application of those traditional protections to groups and individuals defined as the enemy in the new global conflict. Once the White House declared Iraq a crucial front in the war on terrorism, it was perhaps inevitable that those safeguards would be abandoned in places like Abu Ghraib. John Yoo's key memorandum on the Geneva Conventions, dated Jan. and Defense Department general counsel William J Haynes. Less than three weeks later, Gonzales sent a memo to the president that endorsed Yoo's arguments and added new conclusions of his own, denigrating the Geneva restrictions on coercive interrogation as "obsolete" and "quaint" in the war on terrorism. reports in its current issue, the only negative internal response to Yoo's "bold" departure originated in the State Department, which was unsurprisingly excluded from the policy deliberations. advocates of human rights law have been appalled by what they regard as the administration's conscious, secretive determination to open loopholes in traditional American commitments to international legality. Scott Horton, chairman of the Association of the Bar of New York City's committee on international law, has scrutinized the Bush policies in detail, including Yoo's memoranda. "They don't have a good grasp of the operative law here," Horton says. They want to pick their way around it, like a criminal defense lawyer. That's not the way a modern state is supposed to comply with its obligations under the Geneva conventions, which require the most scrupulous adherence." Advertisement Echoing Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Yoo now insists that the Bush administration treated Iraq as separate and distinct from Guantnamo and Afghanistan, where the Geneva Conventions were held to be inapplicable. acknowledged that the obvious and alleged violations at Abu Ghraib must be investigated and punished, he says it is mere "speculation" to suggest that the methods used to interrogate members of the Taliban and al-Qaida "infected" the Iraqi prisons. That question -- as well as the alleged complicity of top administration officials in the violence and degradation that has disgraced the American military in Iraq and Afghanistan -- will be the focus of investigation going forward. Page 1 This article was originally published in a different format. Reproduction of material from any Salon pages without written permission is strictly prohibited. SALON is registered in the US Patent and Trademark Office as a trademark of Salon Media Group Inc. |
| www.csua.org/u/j4q -> www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/05/17/040517fa_fact2 One of them, Master-at-Arms William J Kimbro, a Navy dog handler, should be commended, Taguba wrote, because he "knew his duties and refused to participate in improper interrogations despite significant pressure from the MI"--military intelligence--"personnel at Abu Ghraib." Elsewhere in the report it became clear what Kimbro would not do: American soldiers, Taguba said, used "military working dogs to frighten and intimidate detainees with threats of attack, and in one instance actually biting a detainee." Taguba's report was triggered by a soldier's decision to give Army investigators photographs of the sexual humiliation and abuse of prisoners. These images were first broadcast on "60 Minutes II" on April 28th. Seven enlisted members of the 372nd Military Police Company of the 320th Military Police Battalion, an Army reserve unit, are now facing prosecution, and six officers have been reprimanded. Last week, I was given another set of digital photographs, which had been in the possession of a member of the 320th. According to a time sequence embedded in the digital files, the photographs were taken by two different cameras over a twelve-minute period on the evening of December 12, 2003, two months after the military-police unit was assigned to Abu Ghraib. One of the new photographs shows a young soldier, wearing a dark jacket over his uniform and smiling into the camera, in the corridor of the jail. In the background are two Army dog handlers, in full camouflage combat gear, restraining two German shepherds. The dogs are barking at a man who is partly obscured from the camera's view by the smiling soldier. Another image shows that the man, an Iraqi prisoner, is naked. His hands are clasped behind his neck and he is leaning against the door to a cell, contorted with terror, as the dogs bark a few feet away. Other photographs show the dogs straining at their leashes and snarling at the prisoner. In another, taken a few minutes later, the Iraqi is lying on the ground, writhing in pain, with a soldier sitting on top of him, knee pressed to his back. Another photograph is a closeup of the naked prisoner, from his waist to his ankles, lying on the floor. On his right thigh is what appears to be a bite or a deep scratch. There is another, larger wound on his left leg, covered in blood. There is at least one other report of violence involving American soldiers, an Army dog, and Iraqi citizens, but it was not in Abu Ghraib. s unleashed a military dog on a group of civilians during a sweep in Ramadi, about thirty miles west of Fallujah. At first, Kindy told me, "the soldiers went house to house, and arrested thirty people." Khashab told Kindy that the American soldiers then "turned the dog loose inside the house, and several people were bitten." I've never heard of it, and it would never have been tolerated," Hines said. He added that trained police dogs have long been a presence in Army prisons, where they are used for sniffing out narcotics and other contraband among the prisoners, and, occasionally, for riot control. But, he said, "I would never have authorized it for interrogating or coercing prisoners. If I had, I'd have been put in jail or kicked out of the Army." The International Red Cross and human-rights groups have repeatedly complained during the past year about the American military's treatment of Iraqi prisoners, with little success. In one case, disclosed last month by the Denver Post, three Army soldiers from a military-intelligence battalion were accused of assaulting a female Iraqi inmate at Abu Ghraib. After an administrative review, the three were fined "at least five hundred dollars and demoted in rank," the newspaper said. Army commanders had a different response when, on January 13th, a military policeman presented Army investigators with a computer disk containing graphic photographs. The images were being swapped from computer to computer throughout the 320th Battalion. The Army's senior commanders immediately understood they had a problem--a looming political and public-relations disaster that would taint America and damage the war effort. One of the first soldiers to be questioned was Ivan Frederick, the MP sergeant who was in charge of a night shift at Abu Ghraib. to the front door of our building, out of sight from my room," Frederick wrote, "while . Frederick later formally agreed to permit the agents to search for cameras, computers, and storage devices. COMING SOON A searchable index, with abstracts, back to 1925. newsletter sign-up The New Yorker This Week: Links to articles and Web-only features, delivered to your e-mail inbox. com The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached, or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of CondNet Inc. This Site looks and works best when viewed using browsers enabled with JavaScript 15 and CSS, such as Firefox 2+ or Internet Explorer 6+. |
| zfacts.com/p/100.html maybe McCain: No The Neocons and Torture The neocon reaction to the Abu Ghraib torture scandal was to find excuses for torture. Commentary, the more intellectual neocon magazine, promptly published a long article on "the propriety of torture" (Torture: thinking the unthinkable, 7/1/2004). What is remarkable about the article is that the author could not find a single reason that he felt carried any weight for supporting current law which he admits makes it "illegal in the US under any circumstances." His conclusion is that THE TASK, then, is to create controlled, highly regulated, ... In opposition to these legalistic neocon intellectuals, we now have Senator McCain, who was himself tortured for years in Vietnam. He has no trouble finding both moral and practical reasons that torture should not now become Americas policy. His position is in fact identical to Bushs before the neocons got a hold of him. Senate Backs McCain legislation restricting torture by US troops. The legislation would establish the Army Field Manual as the uniform standard for the interrogation of Department of Defense detainees and prohibit cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of persons in the detention of the US government. The McCain amendments are intented to reverse aggressive new Administration positions, put forth by John Yoo and others, about the President's inherent powers to wage war against terrorists. Letter to McCain from a Captain in the US Army Infantry I have served two combat tours with the 82nd Airborne Division, one each in Afghanistan and Iraq. While I served in the Global War on Terror, the actions and statements of my leadership led me to believe that United States policy did not require application of the Geneva Conventions in Afghanistan or Iraq. White House Backs Away / New Definition of Torture By PAUL M BARRETT, Staff Reporter of the Wall St. neoconservative Washington think tank, to hear a lecture by John Yoo on "fighting the new terrorism." Mr Yoo recommended an unusual idea: assassinating more suspected terrorists. During a two-year stint at the Justice Department from 2001 through 2003, he wrote some of the most controversial internal legal opinions justifying the Bush administration's aggressive approach to detaining and interrogating suspected terrorists. Some of those memos have become public, but not all of them. Asked after his AEI talk whether there is a classified Justice Department opinion justifying assassinations, Mr Yoo hinted that he'd written one himself. "You would think they -- the administration -- would have had an opinion about it, given all the other opinions, wouldn't you?" he said, adding, "And you know who would have done the work." A spokesman for the Justice Department declined to comment. At the Justice Department, Mr Yoo crafted legal arguments for the president's power to launch pre-emptive strikes against terrorists and their supporters. And he interpreted the federal antitorture statute as barring only acts that cause severe mental harm or pain like that accompanying "death or organ failure." In the wake of the Abu Ghraib prisoner-abuse scandal, the Bush administration has backed away from Mr Yoo's most extreme ideas about interrogation. Former Secretary of State Colin Powell warned in 2002 in an internal memo that Mr Yoo's ideas about treatment of detainees would "undermine the protections of the law of war for our troops." |
| www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/07/03/060703fa_fact1 Powell, Colin (Secretary of State) On December 18th, Colin Powell, the former Secretary of State, joined other prominent Washington figures at FedEx Field, the Redskins' stadium, in a skybox belonging to the team's owner. During the game, between the Redskins and the Dallas Cowboys, Powell spoke of a recent report in the Times which revealed that President Bush, in his pursuit of terrorists, had secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on American citizens without first obtaining a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, as required by federal law. This requirement, which was instituted by Congress in 1978, after the Watergate scandal, was designed to protect civil liberties and curb abuses of executive power, such as Nixon's secret monitoring of political opponents and the FBI's eavesdropping on Martin Luther King, Jr. Nixon had claimed that as President he had the "inherent authority" to spy on people his Administration deemed enemies, such as the anti-Vietnam War activist Daniel Ellsberg. Both Nixon and the institution of the Presidency had paid a high price for this assumption. But, according to the Times, since 2002 the legal checks that Congress constructed to insure that no President would repeat Nixon's actions had been secretly ignored. According to someone who knows Powell, his comment about the article was terse. Powell was referring to David S Addington, Vice-President Cheney's chief of staff and his longtime principal legal adviser. Powell's office says that he does not recall making the statement. But his former top aide, Lawrence Wilkerson, confirms that he and Powell shared this opinion of Addington. Most Americans, even those who follow politics closely, have probably never heard of Addington. But current and former Administration officials say that he has played a central role in shaping the Administration's legal strategy for the war on terror. Known as the New Paradigm, this strategy rests on a reading of the Constitution that few legal scholars share--namely, that the President, as Commander-in-Chief, has the authority to disregard virtually all previously known legal boundaries, if national security demands it. Under this framework, statutes prohibiting torture, secret detention, and warrantless surveillance have been set aside. A former high-ranking Administration lawyer who worked extensively on national-security issues said that the Administration's legal positions were, to a remarkable degree, "all Addington." Another lawyer, Richard L Shiffrin, who until 2003 was the Pentagon's deputy general counsel for intelligence, said that Addington was "an unopposable force." The overarching intent of the New Paradigm, which was put in place after the attacks of September 11th, was to allow the Pentagon to bring terrorists to justice as swiftly as possible. Criminal courts and military courts, with their exacting standards of evidence and emphasis on protecting defendants' rights, were deemed too cumbersome. Instead, the President authorized a system of detention and interrogation that operated outside the international standards for the treatment of prisoners of war established by the 1949 Geneva Conventions. Terror suspects would be tried in a system of military commissions, in Guantnamo Bay, Cuba, devised by the executive branch. The Administration designated these suspects not as criminals or as prisoners of war but as "illegal enemy combatants," whose treatment would be ultimately decided by the President. By emphasizing interrogation over due process, the government intended to prempt future attacks before they materialized. In November, 2001, Cheney said of the military commissions, "We think it guarantees that we'll have the kind of treatment of these individuals that we believe they deserve." Yet, almost five years later, this improvised military model, which Addington was instrumental in creating, has achieved very limited results. Not a single terror suspect has been tried before a military commission. Only ten of the more than seven hundred men who have been imprisoned at Guantnamo have been formally charged with any wrongdoing. Earlier this month, three detainees committed suicide in the camp. Germany and Denmark, along with the European Union and the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, have called for the prison to be closed, accusing the United States of violating internationally accepted standards for humane treatment and due process. The New Paradigm has also come under serious challenge from the judicial branch. Two years ago, in Rasul v Bush, the Supreme Court ruled against the Administration's contention that the Guantnamo prisoners were beyond the reach of the US court system and could not challenge their detention. And this week the Court is expected to deliver a decision in Hamdan v Rumsfeld, a case that questions the legality of the military commissions. For years, Addington has carried a copy of the US Constitution in his pocket; taped onto the back are photocopies of extra statutes that detail the legal procedures for Presidential succession in times of national emergency. Many constitutional experts, however, question his interpretation of the document, especially his views on Presidential power. Scott Horton, a professor at Columbia Law School, and the head of the New York Bar Association's International Law committee, said that Addington and a small group of Administration lawyers who share his views had attempted to "overturn two centuries of jurisprudence defining the limits of the executive branch. As for the Administration's legal defense of torture, which Addington played a central role in formulating, Schlesinger said, "No position taken has done more damage to the American reputation in the world--ever." COMING SOON A searchable index, with abstracts, back to 1925. newsletter sign-up The New Yorker This Week: Links to articles and Web-only features, delivered to your e-mail inbox. com The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached, or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of CondNet Inc. This Site looks and works best when viewed using browsers enabled with JavaScript 15 and CSS, such as Firefox 2+ or Internet Explorer 6+. |