Way back in May, Bush administration officials wanted everyone to know that they followed the Geneva Conventions. It wasn’t much of a boast; the U.S. government has been committed to honoring the conventions for a generation.
But, as it turns out, the administration that’s never particularly cared for international treaties didn’t really mean they’d abide by the Geneva Conventions all the time. Indeed, it appears the administration is willing to stray from the treaty whenever it suits them.
Over the weekend, for example, the Washington Post reported that John Ashcroft’s Justice Department, at the request of the CIA, drafted a confidential memo that authorizes the agency to transfer detainees out of Iraq for interrogation — a practice that international legal specialists say contravenes the Geneva Conventions.
Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention prohibits the “[i]ndividual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory … regardless of their motive,” which the administration’s tactics appear to violate. The CIA reportedly used the DoJ memo “as legal support for secretly transporting as many as a dozen prisoners out of Iraq in the past six months,” concealing them from the International Red Cross.
Accounts went from bad to worse today, with the New York Times reporting that the administration has decided that foreign insurgents captured in Iraq are not protected by the international treaty.
A new legal opinion by the Bush administration has concluded for the first time that some non-Iraqi prisoners captured by American forces in Iraq are not entitled to the protections of the Geneva Conventions, administration officials said Monday.
The opinion, reached in recent months, establishes an important exception to public assertions by the Bush administration since March 2003 that the Geneva Conventions applied comprehensively to prisoners taken in the conflict in Iraq, the officials said.
It’s helpful to keep John McCain’s quote from the weekend in mind:
”These conventions and these rules are in place for a reason because you get on a slippery slope and you don’t know where to get off,” McCain, R-Ariz., told ABC’s ”This Week.” ”The thing that separates us from the enemy is our respect for human rights,” he said.
Not anymore.
The Washington Post editorial page noted today that these violations of the Geneva Conventions may not be as shocking as the violations at Abu Ghraib — because there are no photos to reinforce the outrage — but it’s nevertheless startling that the administration is incapable of learning from its mistakes.
The Bush administration pretends, and many Americans may believe, that the abuse of U.S.-held prisoners abroad ended after the release of sensational photographs from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Sadly, it did not. While blaming the crimes at Abu Ghraib on a small group of low-ranking soldiers, the White House, the Pentagon and the CIA have fought to preserve the exceptional and sometimes secret policies that allow U.S. personnel to violate the Geneva Conventions and other laws governing the handling and interrogation of foreign detainees. Under those policies, practices at odds with basic American values continue — even if there are no sensational photos to document them.
Let’s not forget that it was White House counsel Alberto Gonzales who described the protections guaranteed by the Geneva Conventions as “quaint” and “obsolete” last year. And it was the president who personally signed off on a February 2002 memo that said Bush has “the authority under the Constitution” to deny protections of the Geneva Conventions to combatants picked up during the war in Afghanistan. In other words, the president thinks he has the authority to ignore laws he doesn’t feel like following because he’s the president.
Bush and his gang know no limits. They can’t be burdened with meddlesome details like “laws” and “treaties”; they have their own reality to create.