The Robert of Robert’s Stochastic thoughts and I are just about exactly the same age. And like him, I find the use of the phrase “begs the question” to mean anything far from “avoiding grappling with the issue” to clang horribly. (Robert would have it be something like making a lousy argument, thus leaving the question un-answered, which works for me too).
Just mentioning.
Sen. Graham has a reputation as an honorable man, and of the GOP Senators has tended to be one of the better ones on the torture issue, probably due to his experience as an Army JAG officer. That makes his introduction of the Graham Amendment and especially the speech in support of the amendment so very hard to explain.
For a full-bore, devastating, refutation of the claim Sen. Graham made last week citing the danger of litigation abuse in support of his proposal to cut off meaningful judicial review of the conditions at Guantánamo — arguments that may well have swayed several votes (including his own, if he believed what he was being told) — see the dramatic deconstruction at Obsidian Wings. In the list that follows the titles are hilzoy’s and Katherine’s, but the rest is just my summaries of their much fuller and well-supported posts:
(a) that the videos, etc. might not be cleared by the time they arrived, and
(b) that if, on that visit, the detainees did not agree to be represented by them, the detainees would forfeit their right to counsel.”
It was this Catch-22 which led to the lawsuit.
He was left in these stress positions for a period of hours, and because he was not allowed to use the washroom, eventually urinated on the floor and upon himself and his clothing. Military police then poured a pine oil solvent onto the floor and onto Petitioner. With Petitioner on his stomach and his hands and feet cuffed together behind his back, they used Petitioner as a human mop, dragging him back and forth through the mixture of urine and pine oil. After he was returned to his cell, Petitioner was not allowed a change of clothes for two days.
If even half this stuff is true, do we really need to ensure that it be allowed to happen without any exterior checks — which is what will happen if the Graham Amendment closes off judicial review?
KAL in the Economst, this week:
Forbes, today, since TIME doesn’t seem to have it online yet:
CIA allegedly hid evidence of detainee torture – report: CIA interrogators apparently tried to cover up the death of an Iraqi ‘ghost detainee’ who died while being interrogated at Abu Ghraib prison, Time magazine reported today, after obtaining hundreds of pages of documents, including an autopsy report, about the case.
The death of secret detainee Manadel al-Jamadi was ruled a homicide in a Defense Department autopsy, Time reported, adding that documents it recently obtained included photographs of his battered body, which had been kept on ice to keep it from decomposing, apparently to conceal the circumstances of his death.
In Justice at Guantanamo? The Paradox of David Hicks, Prof. Devika Hovell of the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia, provides a very measured introduction to the legal quagmire which is the ongoing trial of “Australian Taliban” David Hicks.
Article 5 of the Third Geneva Convention, which requires all persons falling into enemy hands to be presumed to be a prisoner of war until determined otherwise by a competent tribunal. Rather than hold a hearing to determine Hicks’s status, the US has instead presumed he is an ‘enemy combatant’ (a category not recognized by the Geneva Conventions, which divides people into soldier-POW or citizen-criminal). Irregulars, such as the Taliban in Afghanistan, likely fall within the “[m]embers of the armed forces of a Party to the conflict as well as members of militias or volunteer corps forming part of such armed forces” who all are entitled to POW status. (Whether Hicks falls into this group may well be debatable, but it has yet to be debated.)
Unlike the new rules invented by the Pentagon, a mere “enemy combatant” gets a very very second class kind of trial, far below what the Geneva Convention would require for a POW. Aside from their fundamental injustice (see Condemned By the Company We Keep), Prof. Hovell reminds us that there’s another problem too: ” Failure to provide a prisoner of war with a fair trial constitutes a war crime.”
On Monday the Senate will consider the “Bingaman Amendment,” a provision which would remove the habeas-stripping provision from the Graham Amendment adopted Thursday. Forty-nine Senators voted for the Graham amendment; a few were absent. The odds do not look at all good, even if one assumes that Sen. Wyden’s vote was tactical and that Sen. Olympia Snow is educable on this issue.
The folks at The Million Phone March are providing an interface by which US voters can contact their Senators. It can’t hurt.
Someone has been going around the blogs posting a quite detailed and plausible rebuttal to the allegations raised by Italian TV and noted here under the title US Admits White Phosphorus Use In Fallujah. The core of it is that the white phosphorus artillery rounds in question are to make light or smoke, and that in any ordinary case you are more at risk if the cannister lands on your head than you are from the phosphorus itself. You can see a copy of it in the comments to that item, and on other blogs too. I would be delighted if this rebuttal proves correct.
Even so, alas, the other point remains: what did our bloody fighting in Fallujah achieve in the end, and was it worth the US and Iraqi casualties, not to mention the destruction of the city?
Jotwell Blenderlaw