I must’ve missed the part where Congress is getting involved. I thought the photos were being requested by some civil rights group under the FoIA, and the Court was telling the Pentagon they have to comply with that request.
What is Congress doing?
Not a damn thing actually. Great leadership is being shown by the Republican dominated Congress in investigating this critical issue involving our national honor.
Oh wait, sorry, nobody got blown in the White House, not a critical issue involving our national honor after all. Move along.
There’re a couple of related ammendments that various folks are trying to tack on to a defense spending bill. The ammendments involve the treatment of detainees. Team Bush and it’s backers are agin both ammendments, the one offered by Dems and the one offered by Pubs.
I heard a sound byte from McCainsaying that his amm merely amounted to saying that detainees must be treated according to the Army feild manual or some such. Because, apparently the manual is a set of guidelines. I learned that listening to some top brass JAGs testifying.
Christ why??? Do they enjoy this shit or something? Gods. You’d think they would learn and be bending over backwards to make sure we give both the appearence and the reality that we are fixing this fuckup so it NEVER happens again. 
-XT
I’ve not examined the issues up close, so I can’t tell you what the operative staements are right now.
However…
Keep in mind that we’re discussing the same crew who generated a new definition of torture that varies from the reasonable common sense one.
Bamboo under the fingernails- no longer torture.
Thumbscrews- no longer torture
Electrical shocks- no longer torture
Red-hot irons- no longer torture
Beatings with strips of rubber- no longer torture
To be torture these days it must rise “to the level of death, organ failure, or the permanent impairment of a significant body function.”
For starters, congressmen are trying to set limits on what sort of “interrogation techniques” will be allowed. These limits were to be part of the defense bill that was “cancelled” this week.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5092776/site/newsweek/
June 7 issue -
“I recognize we have a very grave problem,” Rice said, according to Scott Horton, a New York lawyer at the meeting whose account was corroborated by another participant. “There are major investigations going on right now to fully understand the scope and nature of it.” But numerous critics—not just in the human-rights community, but in Congress and the U.S. military as well—insist that the current probes are still too limited to bring full accountability. Some critics say Donald Rumsfeld’s Defense Department is doing its best to stop potentially incriminating information from coming out, that it’s deflecting Congress’s inquiries and shielding higher-ups from investigation. …
On Capitol Hill, legislators on both sides of the aisle complain testily that the Pentagon has turned into an informational black hole. Some 2,000 out of 6,000 pages were missing from the copy of the Taguba report delivered from the Pentagon to the Senate Armed Services Committee. Pentagon spokesman Larry DiRita last week called this merely an “oversight.” But among the missing pages were key documents, including the final section of Taguba’s lengthy questioning of Col. Thomas Pappas, commander of the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, the unit that actually ran the interrogations in Abu Ghraib Block 1A when the abuses occurred. …Some senators say the Pentagon has so far obscured two issues: who ordered Miller to Abu Ghraib in the first place, and who in the Pentagon knew of the interrogation practices put in place there. …As one committee member, Sen. Robert Byrd, told NEWSWEEK: “I was stunned that the two top generals [in the Gulf] hemmed and hawed and claimed they had no idea whether the secretary of Defense or the civilian leadership of the Defense Department played any role.” …
Even Bush’s Republican allies, like Armed Services Committee chair John Warner, want to know more. And now the White House seems to be constructing a legal moat around the president. Its argument is that Bush’s orders were simply disobeyed. Rice told the human-rights lawyers last week that the president’s clear directives on observing the Geneva Conventions and anti-torture laws were not followed. She also allowed that she didn’t know yet the full scope of the scandal, which seemed to conflict with Bush’s insistence that a few bad MPs were to blame.
My comment on the above: On the one hand, the White House wants to use “any means necessary” in order to “protect Americans”. This was the driving factor behind the legal maneuvering and the Gonzales involvement in drafting a policy that would exclude these prisoners from any Geneva conventions protections - terrorists rather than regular prisoners or prisoners of war (enemy combatants). On the other hand the White House is not willing now to accept any of the fallout from a policy they themselves created.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/28/AR2005072801745.html
Friday, July 29, 2005; Page A22
FOR 15 MONTHS now the Bush administration has insisted that the horrific photographs of abuse from the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq were the result of freelance behavior by low-level personnel and had nothing to do with its policies. …
For some time these implacable positions have been glaringly at odds with the known facts. In the past few days, those facts have grown harder to ignore.
The latest evidence has emerged from hearings at Fort Meade about two of those low-level Abu Ghraib guards who are charged with using dogs to terrorize Iraqi detainees. On Wednesday, the former warden of Abu Ghraib, Maj. David DiNenna, testified that the use of dogs for interrogation was recommended by Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, the former commander of the Guantanamo Bay prison who was dispatched by the Pentagon to Abu Ghraib in August 2003 to review the handling and interrogation of prisoners. On Tuesday, a military interrogator testified that he had been trained in using dogs by a team sent to Iraq by Gen. Miller.
In statements to investigators and in sworn testimony to Congress last year, Gen. Miller denied that he recommended the use of dogs for interrogation, or that they had been used at Guantanamo. “No methods contrary to the Geneva Convention were presented at any time by the assistance team that I took to [Iraq],” he said under oath on May 19, 2004. Yet Army investigators reported to Congress this month that, under Gen. Miller’s supervision at Guantanamo, an al Qaeda suspect named Mohamed Qahtani was threatened with snarling dogs, forced to wear women’s underwear on his head and led by a leash attached to his chains – the very abuse documented in the Abu Ghraib photographs.
The court evidence strongly suggests that Gen. Miller lied about his actions, and it merits further investigation by prosecutors and Congress. But the Guantanamo commander was not acting on his own: The interrogation of Mr. Qahtani, investigators found, was carried out under rules approved by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld on Dec. 2, 2002. …
The only good news in this shameful story is that a group of Republican senators, though resisting justified Democratic demands for an independent investigation, are attempting to reform the policy of abuse to which the administration still adheres. Six GOP senators led by John McCain (Ariz.) and Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.) have backed an amendment to the defense operations bill that would exclude exceptional interrogation techniques at Guantanamo Bay and ban the use of “cruel, inhumane and degrading” treatment for all prisoners held by the United States. The administration contends that detainees held abroad may be subject to such abuse. Attempts by the White House and Mr. Warner to block or gut the legislation failed, and on Tuesday the GOP leadership pulled the defense bill from the floor rather than allow a vote.
*My comment: And now the spin. The spin is, it is “unpatriotic” to be upset about torture. *
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4955924/
Posted Tuesday, May 11, 2004, at 3:52 PM PT - The rapidly emerging conservative line on Abu Ghraib is that Congress and the news media are exploiting the story in order to discredit the Bush administration. “Clearly, the images are serving the political agenda of many newspapers,” sniffed Col Allen, editor-in-chief of the New York Post, to the New York Times. Until this past Saturday Abu Ghraib was kept off Page One of the Rupert Murdoch-owned Post, proving that the Post’s loyalty to right-wing politics is greater than its not-inconsiderable loyalty to Fleet Street-style tabloid journalism….
But other conservative commentators, while less skittish about discussing Abu Ghraib, have adopted more or less the same argument. Torture is bad; liberal outrage against torture is worse. “Like reporters at a free buffet,” intoned the Wall Street Journal editorial board on May 6, “Members of Congress are swarming to the TV cameras to declare their outrage and demand someone’s head, usually Donald Rumsfeld’s.” Shame on Congress for wanting to hold the defense secretary responsible for losing control of the troops he sent to Baghdad! It’s an “ersatz scandal,” Midge Decter, author of a hagiographic Rumsfeld biography, pronounced in the May 7 Los Angeles Times….
Conservative Abu Ghraib denial reached its crudest expression today, at a Senate hearing, when Sen. James Inhofe, R., Okla., pronounced, “I’m probably not the only one up at this table that is more outraged by the outrage than we are by the treatment. … I am also outraged that we have so many humanitarian do-gooders right now crawling all over these prisons looking for human rights violations, while our troops, our heroes are fighting and dying.”
Deny though it may, the right can’t avoid forever any engagement with the ugly things that happened at Abu Ghraib. It will have to grapple with what the prison guards did and what made them do it.
My comment on the above: Torture is wrong. Period. Anyone who defends it, or tries to spin it into “traitorous acts” is beyond contempt. I am outraged at the phony outrage against the genuine outrage.
I’m just waiting for someone here to actually have the guts to say “I like and support torture murder and rape”, instead of dancing around it and trying to be clever with words. I’m waiting for someone here to say anyone who opposes this is unAmerican. So far, there has been spin about “wait until we know all the facts” and “we don’t know who is guilty” and “don’t assign guilt because these are good fine Ammuricans”. and “blahblahblahblahmeeblemeebleyadayadayada”. I have to ask myself. Are people so blindly partisan, or just so blind that they will go along with any atrocity because their boys are doing it or because their boys gave permission (enemy combatants, torture polices, indefinite detainment in secret places). Bullshit on all that.
With the fancy words, denials, evasions, and outright horse shit, that is exactly what you people are saying. You are saying human life is nothing, so long as the right buzz words are used. So long as its your party allowing it. Do you realize how sick that is? How disgusting that is?
We KNOW these things are happening. We KNOW who is doing it. We KNOW who set it all in motion. And we KNOW who is stonewalling any attempts to correct it (Defense bill was pulled by guess which party, because of certain amendments). Just come right out and say “I like evil shit” and be done with it. Weaseling hypocriites.
Torture and murder are wrong. Period. I don’t give a shit who does it, it is wrong. Anyone who spins it, supports it or looks the other way is garbage.
For XT
White House Aims to Block Legislation on Detainees
By Josh White and R. Jeffrey Smith
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, July 23, 2005; Page A01
The Bush administration in recent days has been lobbying to block legislation supported by Republican senators that would bar the U.S. military from engaging in “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment” of detainees, from hiding prisoners from the Red Cross, and from using interrogation methods not authorized by a new Army field manual.
Vice President Cheney met Thursday evening with three senior Republican members of the Senate Armed Services Committee to press the administration’s case that legislation on these matters would usurp the president’s authority and – in the words of a White House official – interfere with his ability “to protect Americans effectively from terrorist attack.”
…in a statement sent to Capitol Hill on Thursday that President Bush’s advisers would urge him to veto the $442 billion defense bill “if legislation is presented that would restrict the President’s authority to protect Americans effectively from terrorist attack and bring terrorists to justice.”
The threat was a veiled reference to legislation drafted by McCain and being circulated among at least 10 Republican senators…
…amendment would set uniform standards for interrogating anyone detained by the Defense Department and would limit interrogation techniques to those listed in the Army field manual on interrogation…
…require that all foreign nationals in the custody or effective control of the U.S. military must be registered with the International Committee of the Red Cross – a provision specifically meant to block the holding of “ghost detainees”…
…would not apply to detainees in CIA custody…
Another McCain amendment prohibits the “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment” of anyone in the custody of the U.S. government. …modeled after wording in the U.N. Convention Against Torture … is meant to overturn an administration position that the convention does not apply to foreigners outside the United States.
…Republican effort is intended partly to cut off an effort by Senate Democrats to attach more stringent demands to the defense bill regarding detainees.
Apparently the operative statement is that the Army field manual restricts the President’s authority to protect Americans.
I like evil shit.
There, do you feel better now? :rolleyes:
Your passion is fine. This isn’t the Forum for making it quite this personal.
[ /Moderator Mode ]
Christ…what a bunch of fucking morons. Don’t they see how this will HURT our ability in Iraq and elsewhere? How can they be so short sighted and stupid. Rhetorical question that, I can imagine how they can be so short sighted and stupid. :smack: !!
As always thanks for the info PatriotX.
-XT
As usual, I doubt it’s that simple. Do you know exactly what the field manual says, and that there isn’t a need to update it?
I certainly don’t support giving the President unrestricted use of any ineterrogatoin technique he finds necessary, but we do need to move beyond the Genva Convention here (which is what I suspect the army field manual is based on). If we followed the GC (applicable to POWs), all we could do is ask for name rank and serial number. We couldn’t do any interrogation at all.
Before calling somone a moron, wouldn’t it make sense to first look up the details in the field manual and determine if they are out of date or not?
No John, I don’t know whats in the new Army field manual on the treatment of prisoners. I vaguely remember what was in the Navy regs from my time in service but its probably different than the Army in any case. I would tend to doubt that its outdated though if its a NEW Army field manual, but ‘new’ could be a relative term.
I know that from a PR perspective this was a pretty stupid stance to take at this time, at least from where I’m looking at things right now, so I think the tag of ‘morons’ is pretty appropriate. If I get a chance later tonight I might have some time to actually look up the relevant regs and see if they REALLY restrict the president from being able to protect America. If you have any information that goes along those lines by all means lets take a look.
-XT
Well, the top Jags from more than one of the Armed Forces have all expressed their reservations about the direction that WH policy is pushing things.
I sat spell bound watching C-Span testimony about the affair. ( I know, I know. Rib me all you like, but yes I was glued to the screen over CSPAN)
Here’re some more recent stories. I"ve not the time today to lok any harder than this re JAGs’ objections.
Military’s Opposition to Harsh Interrogation Is Outlined
Senior military lawyers lodged vigorous and detailed dissents in early 2003 as an administration legal task force concluded that President Bush had authority as commander in chief to order harsh interrogations of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, newly disclosed documents show.
In memorandums written by several senior uniformed lawyers in each of the military services as the legal review was under way, they had urged a sharply different view and also warned that the position eventually adopted by the task force could endanger American service members.
…deputy judge advocate general of the Air Force, Maj. Gen. Jack L. Rives, advising the task force that several of the “more extreme interrogation techniques, on their face, amount to violations of domestic criminal law” as well as military law.
So we’re not talking about mere treehuggers’ objections here.
We’re talking about yet another instance where Team Bush is not only ignoring the thoughts of the professionals, but is proceeding against the pros best judgments.
Let’s not forget (my emphasis of the part somehow not incuded in Patriot’s original quote):
It’s always tricky with legislation, because you get either all of it or none of it. The president doesn’t have the authority to veto only portions fo a bill. I’m not trying to defend Bush here, because I do think Congress needs to put some limits on what is going on. The question is, are these the right limits?
Well, the top Jags from more than one of the Armed Forces have all expressed their reservations about the direction that WH policy is pushing things.
I sat spell bound watching C-Span testimony about the affair. ( I know, I know. Rib me all you like, but yes I was glued to the screen over CSPAN)
Here’re some more recent stories. I"ve not the time today to lok any harder than this re JAGs’ objections.
Military’s Opposition to Harsh Interrogation Is Outlined
Senior military lawyers lodged vigorous and detailed dissents in early 2003 as an administration legal task force concluded that President Bush had authority as commander in chief to order harsh interrogations of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, newly disclosed documents show.
In memorandums written by several senior uniformed lawyers in each of the military services as the legal review was under way, they had urged a sharply different view and also warned that the position eventually adopted by the task force could endanger American service members.
…deputy judge advocate general of the Air Force, Maj. Gen. Jack L. Rives, advising the task force that several of the “more extreme interrogation techniques, on their face, amount to violations of domestic criminal law” as well as military law.
So we’re not talking about mere treehuggers’ objections here.
We’re talking about yet another instance where Team Bush is not only ignoring the thoughts of the professionals, but is proceeding against the pros best judgments.
It’s obvious who’s really to blame here! Gas the dogs!
My apologies to all. I went over the top there.
No, no, no, that’s absolutely not what the GC provides and no military anywhere would ever have agreed to that. Soldier’s cant be coerced to give more then that, and soldier’s codes of conduct stress that if captured they should give nothing more. But prisoners can be, and are, asked whatever interrogators want to know. Interrogators in WW2 had no problem deriving information without resorting to torture. They intimidated the weakwilled, befriended the frightened, exploited the stupid, and manipulated the proud into revealing what they wanted to know. There’s an extract from a WW2 intelligence bulletin on the methods here.
And lets not forget that as wars go, WW2 was the big one, and if ever torture was ‘needed’ then it was then when what was at stake was actually important. Over a million people were being killed every month for the last two years of WW2. Yet torture was uncommon, but it wasn’t moral scruples that largely prevented it. It just wasn’t needed and was regarded as primitive, unprofessional and often counter-productive.
Nowhere in the Geneva Conventions does it say you cannot interrogate prisoners or ask them questions beyond name, rank, and serial number.
The Conventions do say that all prisoners MUST give their name, rank and serial number to the power that captures them, when asked. It does not say you can’t ask them more questions or that they are prohibited from answering them. In fact, the Convention mentions that if you do ask the prisoners questions you’re supposed to do it in a language they understand. (Duh.)