I never understood why "water boarding" was considered torture.
Posted on 09/07/2006 8:45:05 PM PDT by bitt
Many of the harsh interrogation techniques repudiated by the Pentagon on Wednesday would be made lawful by legislation put forward the same day by the Bush administration. And the courts would be forbidden from intervening.
The proposal is in the last 10 pages of an 86-page bill devoted mostly to military commissions, and it is a tangled mix of cross-references and pregnant omissions.
But legal experts say it adds up to an apparently unique interpretation of the Geneva Conventions, one that could allow C.I.A. operatives and others to use many of the very techniques disavowed by the Pentagon — including stress positions, sleep deprivation and extreme temperatures.
“It’s a Jekyll and Hyde routine,” Martin S. Lederman, who teaches constitutional law at Georgetown University, said of the administration’s dual approaches.
In effect, the administration is proposing to write into law a two-track system that has existed as a practical matter for some time.
So-called high-value detainees held by the C.I.A. have been subjected to tough interrogation in secret prisons around the world. More run-of-the-mill prisoners held by the Defense Department have, for the most part, faced milder questioning, although human rights groups say there have been widespread abuses.
The new bill would continue to give the C.I.A. the substantial freedom it has long enjoyed, while the revisions to the Army Field Manual announced Wednesday would further restrict military interrogators. The legislation would leave open the possibility that the military could revise its own standards to allow the harsher techniques.
John C. Yoo, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and a former Justice Department official who helped develop the administration’s early legal response to the terrorist threat, said the bill would provide people on the front lines with important tools.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
In June, in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, the Supreme Court ruled that a provision of the Geneva Conventions concerning the humane treatment of prisoners applied to all aspects of the conflict with Al Qaeda. The new bill would keep the courts from that kind of meddling, Professor Yoo said.
“There is a rejection of what the court did in Hamdan,” he said, “which is to try to judicially enforce the Geneva Conventions, which no court had ever tried to do before.”
Indeed, the proposed legislation takes pains to try to ensure that the Supreme Court will not have a second bite at the apple. “The act makes clear,” it says in its introductory findings, “that the Geneva Conventions are not a source of judicially enforceable individual rights.”
Though lawsuits will almost certainly be filed challenging the bill should it become law............"
the Slimes reporter makes no sense. He is in a schizophrenic spin. He can't figure out which way to point.
The front line interrogators will place the prisoners balls in a vice depending on the urgency of the info needed. This is all an unfortunate, yet necessary, political show.
The Geneva Conventions were supposed to apply to uniformed soldiers who were fighting for their country. They were not designed to provide protection to murderous thugs who target civilians and don't obey any of the rules of war.
I never understood why "water boarding" was considered torture.
Tell that to Justice John Paul Stevens, who totally misread and even miscited the Geneva Accords in his decision.
Maybe someone has put bush's balls in the old snip snip. He has been pretty soft as of late.
"...the very techniques disavowed by the Pentagon — including stress positions, sleep deprivation and extreme temperatures."
Oh no. Not that. /sarc
I support everything that was used on me in SERE training.
'stress positions'...
like when I have to decide whether to sit next to the mother in law or the old deaf uncle?
I think some of the problems arise out of the fact that they are not all being shot.
"including stress positions, sleep deprivation and extreme temperatures."
Amazing that this is considered "torture". Call me old-fashioned, but I thought that torture included things like slicing the skin and gouging out eyeballs, or electrocution, or acid baths, or bamboo slivers under the fingernails, or being flayed with barbed wire.
Terrorists must laugh at pieces like this.
Me, too. The hajjis HATE the waterboard. Ramsi bin al Sheeb sang like a canary after about a minute on the waterboard.
is that the dunking...?
here's torture...
watch this clip about the Liar and Osama...
http://youtube.com/watch?v=JuH1xwLUnbg
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