I can't believe it: and I can. Nearly three years after the initial order declaring those captured in Afghanistan "enemy combatants," and thus not protected by the Geneva Conventions, the crack legal teams at the State and Justice Departments have written a similar manifesto re Iraqi prisoners, in part to justify what they'd already done, and mostly to justify the evolving gulag (All italics and bolds mine):
A government official said the opinion had been sought by the C.I.A. to establish the legality of its secret transfers of non-Iraqi prisoners, beginning in April 2003, for interrogation outside Iraq. The officials made clear that they were now describing the decision in order to publicly defend the legality of the C.I.A.'s newly disclosed actions.
The contents of the March 2004 draft memo were first reported on Sunday by The Washington Post, which said the C.I.A. had secretly transported as many as a dozen detainees out of Iraq for interrogation purposes in the past six months. On Monday, government officials said the March 2004 document had not been incorporated into the new legal opinion. They also said all of the prisoners the C.I.A. had transferred out of Iraq had been moved between April 2003 and March 2004, with none transferred in the past six months.
But the government officials said the new ruling could open the way for additional transfers on a broader scale, because the status of prisoners being held in Iraq is reviewed on a case-by-case basis. Under the administration opinion, the non-Iraqis who could be deemed exempt from Geneva Conventions would include suspected members of Al Qaeda or other terrorist organizations as well as other non-Iraqis believed to have traveled to the country after the invasion of March 2003 for the purpose of engaging in terrorism or joining in the insurgency.
The administration officials did not specify exactly how decisions about an individual's status under the Geneva Conventions would be made. But they said that the factors would include nationality, affiliation with terrorist organizations and activities inside Iraq, and that the decisions would be made by American government agencies who held the individuals in their custody.
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So they don't even consult lawyers for a figleaf until their actions are leaked, and then they either improvise plans to expand the practice or fold back the curtain long enough to enrage. And those "American government agencies" - do they include the CIA? Military intelligence? How long will be investigations be? Will they have any recourse? Does anyone besides those of us so obsessed really care?
Seymour Hersh doesn't think so. He sees Americans as at best indifferent, at worst applauding (viz. Abu Ghraib):
Abu Ghraib is a symptom, a terrible symptom of a system that went bad from the beginning. From the first days of the war, the attitude was 'We can do anything we want.' When John Walker Lindh – that young boy who was captured with al Qaeda, that lost kid from California – was first captured, the mistreatment was astonishing. He was stripped, thrown around. There was a bullet they didn't take out for days. The soldiers spit on him. There were people at the time who thought it was just madness what we were doing and that it would stop soon. But the American public liked it.
So in a funny way, we got what we wanted. We wanted payback, we wanted revenge. And we saw everybody in al Qaeda, the Taliban, and the Muslim world as our enemy.
Hersh is unsentimental about the attitudes of the soldiers, while pointing to command directives (including the one being developed from the memo above, which we might call the "Son of Gonzales") as the reality check that can only be provided by a leader who understands his/her role:
Look, America is a very racist country and war brings out the worst in it. I have said – several times, publicly – that the one thing I've always liked about Bill Clinton is that he was the first American president since World War II to bomb white people.
There's a lot of racism. And when you fight a war, you dehumanize the other side – that's inevitable. And that's why you need leadership from the president. That's why you need clear guidelines to be established.
As I write this, Hersh is doubtless talking to some enterprising young reporter who wants his comment on the new official opinion -- I have a hard time calling it a "legal opinion," given that it's written to obliterate laws I hold dear. I wonder, if the election goes in a direction I pray for nightly, if a Kerry administration will be able to perform the kind of surgery needed to regenerate the still-evolvintg, now stricken, structuire of international human rights law.