A question goes begging in today's article by Douglas Jehl and Neil A. Lewis on the Army's legal response last December to the initial Red Cross report of torture at Abu Ghraib ("U.S. Disputed Protected Status of Iraq Inmates").

Presented last fall with a detailed catalog of abuses at Abu Ghraib prison, the American military responded on Dec. 24 with a confidential letter to a Red Cross official asserting that many Iraqi prisoners were not entitled to the full protections of the Geneva Conventions. ...

The International Committee of the Red Cross had reported in November that its staff, in a series of visits to Abu Ghraib in October, had "documented and witnessed" ill treatment that "included deliberate physical violence" as well as verbal abuse, forced nudity and prolonged handcuffing in uncomfortable positions.

In Congressional testimony last week, Lt. Gen. Lance Smith, the deputy commander of American forces in the Middle East, asserted that the Dec. 24 response demonstrated that the military had fully addressed the Red Cross complaints.

But the three-page response did not address many of the specific concerns cited by the Red Cross, whose main recommendations included improving the treatment of prisoners held for interrogation.

Instead, much of the military's reply is devoted to presenting a legal justification for the treatment of a broad category of Iraqi prisoners, including hundreds identified by the United States as "security detainees" in a cellblock at Abu Ghraib and in another facility known as Camp Cropper on the outskirts of the Baghdad airport, where the Red Cross had also found abuses. ...

Under the argument advanced by the military, Iraqi prisoners who are deemed security risks can be denied the right to communicate with others, and perhaps other rights and privileges, at least until the overall security situation in Iraq improves. The military's rationale relied on a legal exemption within the Fourth Geneva Convention.

Nice, huh? The Administration has asserted of late that all prisoners in Iraq are covered under the Geneva Conventions. They neglected to mention the fine print by which "covered," for at least some of those prisoners, means "dropped into the torture pit thanks to our interpretation of a loophole" in the Conventions.

But just tsk-tsking at the Army's mischaracterization of its response to the ICRC misses the point. Was this "legal justification" for detainee torture something cobbled together at the time of the response to the ICRC by a couple of staff lawyers? Seems unlikely, doesn't it, given what we know about the pervasive effort within the Bush Administration to find ways to undermine if not reverse the longstanding U.S. commitment to respecting the Geneva Conventions? (Joe Conason offers a useful summary of that effort here.)

If the answer is no, as it seems it must be, then when exactly was this justification for the torture of security detainees articulated, and by whom, and on whose authority? There's the begged question. The answer would speak a great deal towards the formalization of torture as policy in Iraq. Jehl and Lewis don't ask it, which I find dismaying and disappointing, since Jehl's own earlier reporting practically demands that the question be posed. Last Tuesday, writing with Eric Schmitt, Jehl noted that the policy of coverage under the Geneva Conventions

is a sharp reversal from the one that Pentagon officials described after the major phase of the war in Iraq ended last May. Then, American officers said that the thousands of prisoners in Iraq were being sorted to determine who among them should be labeled unlawful combatants. ... On Monday, however, a senior military officer said in an e-mail message that "no persons in Iraq have been declared unlawful combatants." The Iraqi prisoners held in the American-run prison at Abu Ghraib have been labeled security detainees. In testimony addressing the scandal over the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners there, American officials have said that the Geneva accords are "fully applicable" to all prisoners held by the United States in Iraq.

I took Jehl/Schmitt to task at the time for their unwarranted conclusion that this meant that "the Bush administration appears to have concluded that detention and interrogation procedures permitted under the Geneva Conventions were adequate even for suspected Al Qaeda members captured in Iraq." [Today's piece, of course, offers an ironic fill-in for those notions of "permission" and "adequacy."] It seemed likelier to me that the Pentagon, under the pressure of sorting out the prisoner population while trying to produce intelligence from it, had "simply dispensed with the arduous administrative task of sifting" for unlawful-combatant status, and "gave itself, in the bargain, a freer hand to move detainees through whatever interrogation regimes military intelligence (or others) decided would prove useful." The report today suggests that somebody, somewhere, was tasked with creating (or applying) a fig-leaf interpretation of the Geneva Conventions to expedite just such a process. So again: who made the decision to work a loophole in the Conventions, and when?

posted by michael  1:14:35 PM  
tell me about it []  

 

We're all bozos on this bike. So Bush fell off his bike. (Atrios makes the too-easy training wheels juxtaposition here.) Jesse at Pandagon has the relevant links to the various crypto-fascists for whom John Kerry's bike spill about three weeks ago was a sure sign of both his moral degeneracy and his hopelessness as a candidate.

I'll go Jesse one better: back in March, Kerry took a spill on the ski slopes. There was a lot of right-wing flapdoodle about that one, too, that I don't have the patience to search out now. But let's have a Reading A1 flashback: for the Times' chief Kerry snarkologist, David Halbfinger, his paper then in the midst of giving Kerry the full-Gore treatment, that ski vacation and the Kerry tumble made a perfect focus for everything that the Kewl Kid journalist pack found objectionable about the Dem. And communicated a creepy, almost physical loathing for Kerry in the process. You can go back and read our incomparable post (sorry, Bob Somerby!), but here's the nub of it:

Halbfinger's writing rigorously, not to say programmatically, makes Kerry the butt of physical mockery. Every image Halbfinger offers of the candidate is meant to suggest retreat, cowardice, contortion, ineptitude. The article creates an almost subliminal satire on the notion of vacation, using it at every turn as an opportunity to impute physical and by extension moral weakness to Kerry. ... Halbfinger's like the school bully taunting the kid with a limp.

I invite anyone who cares to try the exercise to imagine what Liz Bumiller will tell us about the deep meaning of the Bush spill in her next White House [Love] Letter. And to reflect on the extraordinary lack of decorum that the Times' political hacks are allowed so long as it's a Democrat in the cross-hairs.

posted by michael  12:16:54 PM  
tell me about it []