Coleen Rowley at HuffPo on the "compromise"

[Greeby]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/coleen-rowley/a-missed-opportunity-for-_b_30052.html

After an all-day meeting with Dick Cheney yesterday, Republican Senators McCain, Graham and Warner emerged to proclaim that they had reached a compromise with the administration on military tribunals and interrogation tactics. McCain expressed "no doubt that the integrity and the letter and the spirit of the Geneva Conventions have been preserved," and Graham insisted it will "take off the table things that are not within American values."

They should know better.

Of the three major flaws in the bill Bush originally presented to Congress, only one has been removed: suspects will have the right to examine the evidence against them, subject to existing rules designed to protect national security. Protection against arbitrary and indefinite incarceration was not part of Bush's proposal, nor is it in the compromise bill. And despite powerful rhetoric about "the integrity and the letter and the spirit of the Geneva Conventions," Bush got his way on that as well. Abuses which were never under discussion --- murder, mutilation and rape, for example --- are now explicitly prohibited; otherwise the President decides what can happen. In other words, this bill would explicitly allow the interrogation practices used at Abu Ghraib, so long as George Bush approved them.

As a 24-year veteran of the FBI, I know that using rough interrogation tactics to overbear a suspect's will is not only wrong ethically, it is ineffective. Subjecting someone to pain and humiliation doesn't compel them to tell the truth; it compels them to say whatever will make the pain stop. This generates bad intelligence. Moreover, when we undercut the Geneva Conventions, we eliminate any motivation for our enemies to treat our captured soldiers humanely. Our goal must be to first disrupt, then detain, interrogate, and prosecute those who would do us harm while remaining true to the rule of law and the principles which have served our country well for more than two centuries. Effective interrogation and intelligence-gathering is not at odds with established legal principles as Bush and Cheney would like us to believe. This is why the FBI forbids the use of torture and rough interrogation methods (like waterboarding), as does the Army Field Manual and the Uniform Code of Military Justice.-snip-

:patriot:

[magellan]

1. The saddest thing about all this

...is that anyone believes this "law" will stop the abuse.

BushCo have been lying about detainee treatment from the get-go. They didn't care about the Geneva Conventions before; they're not going to care about any silly legislation that attempts to codify the GC now. This was all simply an exercise in BushCo CYA tactics. Things will now proceed as usual.

The losers are the detainees and ex-detainees, whose true suffering has been whitewashed and ignored by our government. And of course our country is the biggest loser of all.

[pat_k]

2. even more aboninable, it BANS ENFORCEMENT of INALIENABLE RIGHTS

The so-called "definition problem" is nothing compared to this part (page 79 of http://www.law.georgetown.edu/faculty/nkk/documents/MilitaryCommissions.pdf">Bush's version):

(b) RIGHTS NOT JUDICIALLY ENFORCEABLE.—
(1) IN GENERAL.—No person in any habeas action or any other action may invoke the Geneva Conventions or any protocols thereto as a source of rights, whether directly or indirectly, for any purpose in any court of the United or its States or territories.

So, now it's:


. . .We hold these truths to be self-evident,
that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain
inalienable, UNENFORCEABLE, Rights.

Turley is the first, and so far the only I'm aware of, who has pointed out perhaps this abominable provision.

The War Criminals Protection Act of 2006 has ONE goal -- to protect the War Criminals in the Executive Branch from prosecution for the the war crimes they have committed (and continue to commit).

To that end, the bill seeks to gut U.S. Code of any avenue through which they could be prosecuted, even going so far as to strip our courts of the ability to examine their actions. It is a transparent attempt to escape the consequences that their actions would demand in any civilized society. Their attempt to escape prosecution demonstrates their consciousness of guilt.