Bush Administration Tries To Exempt Itself From War Crime Prosecution

There have been a lot of ramifications for the Bush administration- unseen by most Americans thanks to an unattentive media- in the wake of the Supreme Court decision in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, which ruled that the U.S. is not exempt from the Geneva convention and other laws in undertaking a war on terror. Most concerning the administration right now is the fact the ruling opened them up to the possibility of being prosecuted for war crimes in the wake of countless abuses. Nat Hentoff discusses this in his Village Voice column this week, noting that "the Supreme Court's most shameful instruction to the administration was that, in the way it treats its prisoners anywhere in the world, the standard must be Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions of 1949, to which this country is a signatory." Spoiler alert: they've violated the hell out of that Article. More importantly, Hentoff adds at the end that "the Bush administration is devising ways to persuade Congress to let it weasel out of the Supreme Court's findings in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld- that George W. Bush has been creating, with regard to his treatment of detainees, a country with no laws."

The Washington Post has details on how radical that weaseling is-

The Bush administration has drafted amendments to a war crimes law that would eliminate the risk of prosecution for political appointees, CIA officers and former military personnel for humiliating or degrading war prisoners, according to U.S. officials and a copy of the amendments...

...The draft U.S. amendments to the War Crimes Act would narrow the scope of potential criminal prosecutions to 10 specific categories of illegal acts against detainees during a war, including torture, murder, rape and hostage-taking.

Left off the list would be what the Geneva Conventions refer to as "outrages upon [the] personal dignity" of a prisoner and deliberately humiliating acts -- such as the forced nakedness, use of dog leashes and wearing of women's underwear seen at the U.S.-run Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq -- that fall short of torture...

Did you hear that, Lyndie? You may soon be off the leash hook!

The next day, the LA Times had more details on how this would go-

The Bush administration has drafted amendments to the War Crimes Act that would retroactively protect policymakers from possible criminal charges for authorizing humiliating and degrading treatment of detainees, according to lawyers who have seen the proposal.

The White House, without elaboration, said in a statement that the bill "will apply to any conduct by any U.S. personnel, whether committed before or after the law is enacted."...

Just to be clear- these revisions would be retroactive, so that not only would future abuses would be legally cleared, but all past ones would be excused too. That sounds pretty unconstitutional to me, if not simply frightening in its implications. We already know that certain GOP Senators are working on legislation that would give amnesty for the President's violation of wiretapping laws since 2001; what other crimes are they planning to retroactively okay?

I hope more people than a few journalists are watching this. This needs to be stopped.

Moving on to a related topic- the President's warrantless wiretapping program (also justified by the same extraconstitutional theories used to justify the administration's detainee policies). Crooks and Liars caught an O'Reilly segment last night indicative of how Bush supporters have distorted what is the real scandal behind the program. Discussing news that surveillance may have helped apprehend the U.K. terror suspects, O'Reilly said to Sec. Chertoff, "The fact that the NSA was able to intercept these phone calls that were made in the United States to al-Qaeda in Britain. By using the very controversial, although I understand that warrants were obtained for this by the FISA court... does that mean in your opinion that the Bush administration is, ahhh, justified now in its original policy? Is this a big win politically for you guys?".

The bold was added by me... Did O'Reilly even listen to what he said? He said that, in this case, the government did get the legally-required FISA warrant for that surveillance. If there was a warrant/court oversight- then there is no scandal! The scandal is that the President has been violating the law by refusing to get warrants required by both the 1978 FISA law and the U.S. constitution! It is illegal and unnecessary. That is the scandal. What part of that don't Bush supporters seem to understand??!

As Glenn Greenwald succintly notes in a detailed article on this point, "The NSA eavesdropping scandal has never been about whether the government should eavesdrop. It is about whether the president has the right to break the law."

Finally, Greenwald looks at a new court ruling potentially harmful to freedom of the press.

[PS- Surprise, surprise... the President's approval rating drops once again:
Poll: Bush may be hurting Republicans (AP)]