Oh, there goes the other shoe
I’ve been a little surprised this week by the credulous reaction of the foreign press to Torture President’s alleged “policy reversal” on abiding by the Geneva Conventions. Headline after headline from around the world has announced that the Bush White House, in a “stunning U-turn,” will now extend Geneva protection to all the prisoners at Gitmo.
What are they smoking?
All the Bush administration has done is acknowledge that the Geneva Conventions apply — which is to say, they’ve acknowledged the existence of the Supreme Court ruling in Hamdan. And with practically the same breath they’ve asserted that they’ve always been in compliance with Geneva anyway:
The White House spokesman, Tony Snow, said today that the Pentagon memo was “not really a reversal of policy’’ because detainees were already being treated humanely. A top Pentagon lawyer also insisted, in testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee today, that the memo “doesn’t indicate a shift in policy.”
Snow’s remark was interpreted by most of the press as a risible face-saving gesture, but I think it was nothing of the kind. In fact, Snow was laying out precisely and accurately the administration’s position. Oh, Geneva applies to us after all? Well, fine, because we’re not doing anything wrong anyway. They’re simply going to deny that they’ve tortured and mistreated prisoners. And they’re going to keep right on doing it — the torture, the mistreatment, and the denial.
(By the way, if you have any doubt about the nature of the torture at Gitmo, here’s the Report on Torture and Cruel, Inhuman, and Degrading Treatment of Prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, just issued by the Center for Constitutional Rights. It’s gruesome reading.)
The White House is taking a similar approach to the Supreme Court’s finding in Hamdan that the BushCo kangaroo courts are, well, kangaroo courts:
While Bush verbally pledged to abide by the ruling, the administration’s plea to Congress suggests that it wants the legislature to rubber-stamp the policy the court found illegal.
“All Congress needs to do . . . is to ratify that process, and we can move on very, very quickly,” Daniel J. Dell’Orto, principal deputy general counsel for the Department of Defense, told the House Armed Services Committee.
Thus the deliberate GOP misreading of Hamdan that was taking shape within hours of the ruling is now being mouthed as the official White House line. Nothing wrong with the President’s kangaroo courts that a little Congressional rubber stamp won’t fix! And he’ll probably get it, too, since Congress is clearly full of gibbering sadists who love the idea of innocent brown people being abused and tortured and denied even the most minimal legal rights.
This country is being run by some sick fucks.
2 Responses to “Oh, there goes the other shoe”
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ginmar says:
What do you mean ‘probably’? And don’t you think ’sick fucks’ is kind of an insult to, well, sick fucks? They’re glorying in this crap.
July 13th, 2006 at 10:49 am EST -
Infidel says:
“the most minimal legal rights” would have been to kill them on the spot. But no…let’s interrogate them. That means we’ll have to house them, feed them, and clothe them, guard them, torture them, question them, degrade them, and then when our methods are revealed we’ll have to try them, defend them, release them, monitor them, pay them, apologize to them and worse case capture them again. They could have just been captured, questioned, tried, and probably released.
