The White House officially regards the Poe-Cheney partnership as no more solid or worthy of recognition than Jenna’s latest boyfriend. Here’s how the guest list appeared for last night’s royal state dinner:
Ms. Mary Cheney
Ms. Heather Poe (Guest)Miss Jenna Bush
Mr. Henry Hager (Guest)
Married couples need no “(guest)” attached to their spouse’s name. It’s a trivial slight, of course. But so, from one perspective, is a bus seat.
CYPRUS’S GHOST CITY: Weirdness from Michael Totten.
We are entering Day Eight of the underclass, mainly Muslim, unrest.
A TALE FROM A FAT FARM: You’d think a Brit would love a diet made up entirely of tea, but noooo.
A FORMER SOVIET CAMP? You have to hand it to the Bush administration. They get their symbolism right. In Iraq, they chose to commit some of their worst abuses at Abu Ghraib, Saddam’s former torture hell-hole, and at former Baathist Secret Police headquarters in Basra. Witnesses attest to the sound of screams coming from the Basra facility as the United States continued its diplomatic offensive to win over the Mulsim world to democratic values. And when needing a secret site to torture other detainees, where else but the former Soviet Union? How else to demonstrate how far conservatism has gone from the days when it represented Reagan’s embrace of human rights? Two readers respond:
As an American of East German descent I can imagine few things more offensive than the notion that people are being tortured today by the CIA not only in Eastern Europe, but perhaps in the very same facilities where democratic, pro-western dissidents may have been detained and tortured and murdered during the cold war.
And from another:
As an ex-pat Yank living in Prague I was shocked to learn that the CIA had set up a “center” in the former Eastern Bloc. Happily, it doesn’t appear to be in the Czech Republic. This news item appeared in the press here today:
“Interior Minister Bublan confirmed that the CIA wanted to hold foreigners in the Czech Republic. The Washington Post reported that there were suspected terrorists from Guantanamo and that a site in Eastern Europe was found for about 100 of them. Bublan said the Czech Republic turned down the request.”
It seems I’ve chosen the right country to escape to.
I can’t believe I’m reading this.
THE EIGHT-YEAR-OLD IRANIAN: I asked if anyone could add context or analysis to interpret gruesome photos of a young Iranian having his arm rolled over by a car. The website suggested it was punishment for stealing. A reader believes otherwise:
I think if you look at the photos again, and analysis of it on the forums, you will realize that this is not a punishment, but some kind of street-performance stunt. The man has a microphone and a smile on his face; there is a soft towel underneath his arm; spectators have gathered to watch. I have seen people perform similar stunts to raise a few bucks. I once saw a man have a car run over his abdomen – and I live in Canada! It’s not entirely uncommon. Sure, the kid is 8 years old and shouldn’t be subjected to this kind of humiliation and pain. But the issue here is not Islam or culture – it’s poverty, and the depths to which people will sink to make a living, including what they will subject their children to.
That’s certainly a plausible explanation, and, however repugnant, less horrifying than the alternative. I weighed whether to link to the photos. But sometimes, the image of something so apparently horrifying makes it impossible simply to walk away or avert one’s eyes. Hence my inquiry. I sure hope the reader’s interpretation is correct. If anyone has any further light to shed, I’d be grateful.
The gay marriage compromise devised in last night’s “South Park” can be seen in a brief clip here.
Go to this blog for a summary and an audio link to a debate between John Yoo, the legal brain behind the Bush administration’s abandonment of the ban on cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment of military detainees, and Philippe Sands, Professor of Law, at the University College London. Yoo’s new book is worth reading too, to understand his side of the debate. (This review is also worth reading.) Two more notes: something struck me as rvealing in yesterday’s USA Today. The editorial page argued in favor of the McCain Amendment, and, usually, they get a counter-point from the relevant party, including politicians. But this time: “The Bush administration declined to provide an opposing view.” Yoo, a former Bush official, filled in. He’s almost the only person willing to defend the policies at this point (apart from the WSJ editorial page.) The second point is that all signs are that the McCain Amendment is indeed dying a slow death in the conference committee. Cheney has his point-men in there; and this administration’s ferocious desire to keep torture and abuse legal seems to know no end. Mike Crowley reports on what I have also been hearing here.
I think it was the best episode I have ever known. And the butt-buddy debate will never be quite the same again.
Marty Lederman has some important background on what Geneva’s Article 3 means, how, before Cheney-Rumsfeld, the United States had adhered to it strictly for fifty years, and how the 9/11 Commission specifically recommended that adherence be restored. Money quote:
At page 380 of its Report, the Commission recommended that the United States “engage its friends to develop a common coalition approach toward the detention and humane treatment of captured terrorists,” and expressly urged the U.S. to “draw upon Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions on the law of armed conflict,” which was “specifically designed for those cases in which the usual laws of war did not apply.” Common Article 3’s minimum standards, reasoned the 9/11 Commission, “are generally accepted throughout the world as customary international law.”
Except for rogue states that refuse to abide by even minimal standards of decent treatment. I.e. Bush’s America.
France’s Islamist underground riots have now continued for almost a week, and are spreading.
Now, they’re purging their own diplomats – for being too liberal.
THE RELIGIOUS RIGHT EXPOSED: The not-so-pretty story of the far right’s favorite lawyer – and implacable foe of gay civil rights – Jay Sekulow.
Dick Cheney’s new Scooter Libby, David Addington, is, as one would expect, a big believer in the military’s right to abuse detainees. In the aftermath of the abuse scandals, many in the Pentagon want the U.S. to return to the fold of civilized countries, and its own history, and stop the policy. The same goes for many, many people in the CIA. When honorable soldiers and CIA officials see their own agencies being accurately accused of activities that shock the conscience, they are not happy. Nor are critical allies of the U.S. in the war on terror. But all these voices have been railroaded by the Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal. They aren’t going to back down now:
A central player in the fight over the directive is David S. Addington, who was the vice president’s counsel until he was named on Monday to succeed I. Lewis Libby Jr. as Mr. Cheney’s chief of staff. According to several officials, Mr. Addington verbally assailed a Pentagon aide who was called to brief him and Mr. Libby on the draft, objecting to its use of language drawn from Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions.
“He left bruised and bloody,” one Defense Department official said of the Pentagon aide, Matthew C. Waxman, Mr. Rumsfeld’s chief adviser on detainee issues. “He tried to champion Article 3, and Addington just ate him for lunch.”
Ah, yes. The Geneva Conventions. Remember them? To put it in their allegedly “vague” language, Cheney’s chief aide believes that the U.S. should legally and as a matter of policy be free to conduct interrogations that include “cruel treatment and torture,” and “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, humiliating and degrading treatment.” It doesn’t get much clearer than that, does it?
Well, it’s all beginning to come out now. The CIA has been operating a secret network of detainment facilities across the globe to capture and interrogate suspected terrorists, facilities that would be illegal in the U.S. and where torture is enforced by explicit permission by the president. These facilities were improvised on the fly – like the rest of the war. Money quote:
“We never sat down, as far as I know, and came up with a grand strategy,” said one former senior intelligence officer who is familiar with the program but not the location of the prisons. “Everything was very reactive. That’s how you get to a situation where you pick people up, send them into a netherworld and don’t say, ‘What are we going to do with them afterwards?'”
What goes on in these centers? You already know, don’t you:
Host countries have signed the U.N. Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, as has the United States. Yet CIA interrogators in the overseas sites are permitted to use the CIA’s approved “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques,” some of which are prohibited by the U.N. convention and by U.S. military law. They include tactics such as “waterboarding,” in which a prisoner is made to believe he or she is drowning… Most of the facilities were built and are maintained with congressionally appropriated funds, but the White House has refused to allow the CIA to brief anyone except the chairman and vice chairman of the House and Senate intelligence committees on the program’s generalities.
As so often, the original plan to seize just those suspects who were responsible for 9/11 metastasized into a general program for seizing many suspects, incarcerating them in places like the elegantly named “Salt Pit” in Afghanistan, and torturing them:
[A]s the volume of leads pouring into the CTC from abroad increased, and the capacity of its paramilitary group to seize suspects grew, the CIA began apprehending more people whose intelligence value and links to terrorism were less certain, according to four current and former officials. The original standard for consigning suspects to the invisible universe was lowered or ignored, they said. “They’ve got many, many more who don’t reach any threshold,” one intelligence official said.
One detainee was killed by the CIA, by being exposed naked to freezing cold temperatures overnight. Hey, this is America. We do this kind of thing now. Is it easier to understand why Bush wants an explicit torture exception for the CIA in the McCain Amendment? It’s particularly ironic that Eastern European countries, recently freed from the horrors of communism, now acquiesce to a new prison system where torture takes place beyond the law. These days, though, it’s run by the United States! Just for the record: when the president says he doesn’t condone torture, he is lying. By that I mean: deliberately telling the American people something he knows is not the truth.
THE PRESIDENT AND THE LAW: Here’s a more pertinent question: has Bush broken the law? The WaPo article states the following:
It is illegal for the government to hold prisoners in such isolation in secret prisons in the United States, which is why the CIA placed them overseas, according to several former and current intelligence officials and other U.S. government officials. Legal experts and intelligence officials said that the CIA’s internment practices also would be considered illegal under the laws of several host countries, where detainees have rights to have a lawyer or to mount a defense against allegations of wrongdoing.
All this was achieved by the president signing a “finding” on September 17, 2001:
Under U.S. law, only the president can authorize a covert action, by signing a document called a presidential finding. Findings must not break U.S. law and are reviewed and approved by CIA, Justice Department and White House legal advisers.
The assumption is that the president has authority to set up prisons that would be illegal in the U.S. and illegal in foreign countries, but legal … according to what? No wonder Bush wants Roberts and Alito on the court.
The Dish 