Memo Fueled Deep Rift in Administration on Detainees

[rodeodance]

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/01/washington/01detain.html?hp&ex=1159675200&en=b127f6f57c242095&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Memo Fueled Deep Rift in Administration on Detainees
> By TIM GOLDEN NYTimes
> Published: October 1, 2006
>
> In June 2005, two senior national security officials in the Bush administration came together to propose a sweeping new approach to the growing problems the United States was facing with the detention, interrogation and prosecution of terrorism suspects.
>
> In a nine-page memorandum, the two officials, Gordon R. England, the acting deputy secretary of defense, and Philip D. Zelikow, the counselor of the State Department, urged the administration to seek Congressional approval for its detention policies.
>
> They called for a return to the minimum standards of treatment in the Geneva Conventions and for eventually closing the detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The time had come, they said, for suspects in the 9/11 plot to be taken out of their secret prison cells and tried before military tribunals.
>..........
>
> When the paper first circulated in the upper reaches of the administration, two of those officials said, it so angered Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld that his aides gathered up copies of the document and had at least some of them shredded.
>
> “It was not in step with the secretary of defense or the president,” said one Defense Department official who, like many others, would discuss the internal deliberations only on condition of anonymity. “It was clear that Rumsfeld was very unhappy.”.......

very good article

[Connie_Corleone]

1. KICK nt

[Demit]

2. The last graf is kind of frightening.

"The element of the new legislation that raised the sharpest criticism among legal scholars and human rights advocates last week was the scaling back of the habeas corpus right of terrorism suspects to challenge their detention in the federal courts. But in dozens of high-level meetings on detention policy, officials said, that provision was scarcely even discussed."

Then how did such a sharp curtailing of habeas corpus find its way into the legislation? This article is very unsatisfying. It leaves too much unexamined.