War Crimes Trial

Saddam Hussein and some of his top henchmen sit in U.S. detention in undisclosed locations, awaiting trial for war crimes. But there is a prominent Washington DC lawyer who believes another national leader may face war crimes charges. The leader is President George W. Bush. The lawyer is White House counsel Alberto Gonzales. In a 2002 memo, the White House lawyer focused on a little known 1996 law passed by Congress, known as the War Crimes Act, that banned any Americans from committing war crimes—defined in part as "grave breaches" of the Geneva Conventions. Reports Newsweek:

One key advantage of declaring that Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters did not have Geneva Convention protections is that it "substantially reduces the threat of domestic criminal prosecution under the War Crimes Act," Gonzales wrote. "It is difficult to predict the motives of prosecutors and independent counsels who may in the future decide to pursue unwarranted charges based on Section 2441 [the War Crimes Act]," Gonzales wrote.

In our name, the American government is holding without charge and in often humiliating conditions, thousands of prisoners - some combatants, some terrorists, some bystanders. They have no redress, no legal protection, no legal status. And in our name, some are being tortured, and some subjected to conditions that lead to their deaths. And this is an Administration that has argued against adherence to the Geneva Conventions - and one reason for that argument was to protect Bush and his ministers from prosecution on war crimes charges by successor administrations.

In the end, says Newsweek, after strong protests from Colin Powell, the White House retreated. In February 2002, it proclaimed that, while the United States would adhere to the Geneva Conventions in the conduct of the war in Afghanistan, captured Taliban and Qaeda fighters would not be given prisoner of war status under the conventions. America's disgrace in the eyes of the world continues.

Comments

[chervokas]

yeah, and it gets more convoluted and legalistic than that--first of all, none of the Iraqi detainees have been designated enemy combatants, so as long as they have been in US custody they should have been fully protected by the Geneva Convention agreements; second, the Bush Administration has been playing a legal game w/ detainees reasoning that if they are held by countries that are not signatories to Geneva, the detainees aren't subject to Geneva protections even if US interogators have access to them while in foreign country captivity. It's the same nauseating line of reasoning that the administration has used w/ regard to Gitmo.

[bruce b.]

I agree with both TW and Jason's posts on this issue. As many have pointed out before, we are now running an international Gulag.

I see no reason why Al Queda and Taliban prisoners should be exempt from the Geneva Convention. Certainly the argument doesn't hold for the Taliban -- they were a government (albeit a reprehensible one) beforehand.

Did you guys see this business of the 120,000 "likely terrorists" identified by some database company? And of course the Oregon lawyer who was picked up and held w/o charges (although as I understand it that wasn't under the Patriot Act).

We have gone through this periodically in our past.. the Alien and Sedition Acts, the Palmer Raids, the McCarthy witchtrials, the Japanese Internment in WWII (sadly, by FDR).

I wonder how bad it will get before it gets better.