Here's Your Clarity On Torture!

Bush says he just wants to introduce some legal clarity into what he says are impractically unclear Geneva Convention rules.

If that were really true, he would be calling for a new Geneva Convention to make the unclear into clear for all signatories instead of just redefining them for his own regime.

But of course it isn't. And there are good reasons the Geneva Convention wording is the way it is. I'm indebted to Outside The Beltway's regular commenter "anderson" for the explanation of why - it is so that, having spelt out that A,B, and C are torture, the torturers than cannot blithely and unaccountably go ahead with D, E or A-with-a-twist.

But [retired Army Lt. Col. Geoffrey S. Corn, who was recently chief of the war law branch of the Army’s Office of the Judge Advocate General], said that Common Article 3 was, according to its written history, “left deliberately vague because efforts to define it would invariably lead to wrongdoers identifying ‘exceptions,’ and because the meaning was plain — treat people like humans and not animals or objects.” Eugene R. Fidell, president of the nonprofit National Institute of Military Justice, said that laws governing military conduct are filled with broadly described prohibitions that are nonetheless enforceable, including “dereliction of duty,” “maltreatment” and “conduct unbecoming an officer.”

So there you have it. Bush is trying to redefine a key international law that was left deliberately vague so that torturers wouldn't find ways to do an end-run around it. That's why THREE previous Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff are speaking out against his attempt.

And for this, he is willing to veto the Warner-McCain-Graham bill on military commissions, a bill that is already:

a very bad bill, eliminating judicial review and habeas corpus, and limiting criminal enforcement of Geneva Common Article 3 under the War Crimes Act (apparently Geneva CA3 is still law, but only "grave violations" of Geneva are criminally enforceable). Additionally (p. 82), the new bill says that "no foreign source of law can be used in defining or interpreting" America's obligations under title 18 of the U.S. Code-- i.e., the U.S. criminal code, which would include, presumably, the War Crimes Act and the anti-torture statute.

The Bush regime's insistence on the right to torture (while claiming that they don't) is approaching the level of a fetish - and I do mean fetish in the sexual sense.

Should Bush get his wish, America will have given up any claim to the moral high ground on human rights - without moral legitimacy it will be seen as enforcing its whims by brute force alone. At that point, there will still be a U.S.A. but will it be the same nation as the one the Founders envisioned? Don't forget, the administration refuses to limit itself to foreigners. American citizens can be pronounced "unlawful combatants" too.

Still, should it come to pass, then my only remaining hope is that the uber-right pundits who support torture, extreme executive power and claim anyone to their left is a traitor in league with terrorists have nightmares that it all could be true - and that a Dem president has them all fitted for orange Gitmo suits and electrodes.

If wishing them some bad dreams from which they might wake up wiser and more humane is cruel of me then, hey, it isn't as cruel as waterboarding, stress positions or induced hypothermia.