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.
Officials say the amendments would alter a U.S. law passed in the mid-1990s that criminalized violations of the Geneva Conventions, a set of international treaties governing military conduct in wartime. The conventions generally bar the cruel, humiliating and degrading treatment of wartime prisoners without spelling out what all those terms mean....
The risk of possible prosecution of officials, CIA officers and former service personnel over alleged rough treatment of prisoners arises because the Bush administration, from January 2002 until June, maintained that the Geneva Conventions' protections did not apply to prisoners captured in Afghanistan...
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So, Mr. Gonzales, perhaps the Geneva Convention isn't so "quaint," after all?
1 comment:
I've been engaged in a rather dramatic exchange deep in the comments section of my 2nd cousin's right of center blog Tigerhawk on just this subject, with an Anonymous who believes that war crimes tribunals are ridiculous government impositions and that the president should be empowered to do whatever the consitution does not explicity deny him in wartime. Masochistic of me, perhaps, but I can't resist the dialogue even with folks whose world view is so utterly foreign as this fellow's is from my own. If you wish to venture forth and see where it stands so far, the link is http://tigerhawk.blogspot.com/2006/08/double-standard.html Tigerhawk gets over 3,000 hits a day so you need not fear that your visit will provide further encouragement for the sentiments regulalry expressed therein. Blood is certainly thicker than water...
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