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Bush Flip-Flops on Geneva Convention Protections
The Bush Administration is busy re-writing policy on rights to be accorded prisoners apprehended in Iraq:
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.
They said the opinion would essentially allow the military and the C.I.A. to treat at least a small number of non-Iraqi prisoners captured in Iraq in the same way as members of Al Qaeda and the Taliban captured in Afghanistan, Pakistan or elsewhere, for whom the United States has maintained that the Geneva Conventions do not apply.
The new rule was crafted after this weekend's revelation that the U.S., at the behest of the C.I.A., secretly transported prisoners out Iraq and hid them from the Red Cross, notwithstanding a provision in the Geneva Conventions prohibiting protected civilians from being deported from occupied territories. |
The officials said the new opinion represented a consensus reached by lawyers from the State Department, the Justice Department, the Pentagon, the National Security Council and other agencies in discussions since March 2004, when the Justice Department circulated an initial draft memorandum on the issue. A government official said the opinion had been sought by the C.I.A. to establish the legality of its secret transfers of non-Iraqi prisoners, beginning in April 2003, for interrogation outside Iraq. The officials made clear that they were now describing the decision in order to publicly defend the legality of the C.I.A.'s newly disclosed actions.
Defending the indefensible, that's our Bush. |
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