War Crimes?

From bad to worse to an unmitigated disaster goes the Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal. Newsweek now reports that "[t]he White House's top lawyer warned more than two years ago that U.S. officials could be prosecuted for 'war crimes' as a result of new and unorthodox measures used by the Bush Administration in the war on terrorism, according to an internal White House memo and interviews with participants in the debate over the issue." The memo itself strongly recommended that President Bush exempt the treatment of captured Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters from the Geneva Convention in order to avoid possible liability for dramatically more agressive interrogation techniques approved by the White House.

The memo -- and strong dissents by Secretary of State Colin Powell and his chief legal advisor, William Howard Taft IV -- are among hundreds of pages of internal Administration documents on the Geneva Convention and related issues that have been obtained by Newsweek and are reported for the first time in this week's issue. So while top White House officials publicly talked about trying Al Qaeda leaders for war crimes, the internal memos show that Administration lawyers were privately concerned that they could tried for war crimes themselves based on actions the Administration was taking, and might have to take in the future, to combat the terrorist threat.

Holy crap, this is dynamite! It blows a whole in Rumsfeld's argument that the Abu Ghraib atrocities were committed by a few individuals without sanction by the Pentagon or White House officials. And the really sad part is that the White House counsel concluded that even if the Geneva Convention was determined not to apply, America would still meet "its committment to treat the detainees humanely" consistent with "miniumum standards of treatment recognized by the nations of the world." Parading captives naked, hooded and with attack dogs nearby is hardly the stuff of "humane treatment," it seems to me.

We've got yet another new scandal, folks. If Clinton could be impeached for lying about a blow job, the same conclusion certainly would hold for Bush and an interrogation policy knowingly in violation of the Geneva Convention. Whether that will happen depends on politics, but it just might.

 Posted by glenn