...Our Fearless Leader has determined that he is NOT above international and moral law...(this time anyway):
Geneva rules cover detainees, Bush says
Policy shift is response to court’s ruling on tribunals
By CAROL ROSENBERG and MARGARET TALEV
McClatchy Newspapers
WASHINGTON — In a major reversal of a keystone policy in its war on terrorism, the Bush administration announced Tuesday that all detainees in U.S. military custody — including those at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba — are entitled to Geneva Convention protections that prohibit humiliating treatment and torture.
The change reflects the Pentagon’s response to last month’s U.S. Supreme Court’s 5-3 decision that struck down the administration’s makeshift formula for military tribunals at Guantanamo, declaring their procedures unconstitutional and a violation of Geneva Convention obligations.
The two-page Pentagon memo repudiates a core element of the legal foundation of President Bush’s approach to dealing with terrorism. Bush and his legal advisers initially said the Geneva Conventions did not apply to the war on terrorism because it was a new type of conflict that demanded more aggressive action.
The new Pentagon memo does not change captives’ status as enemy combatants — not prisoners of war — nor does it suggest practices will change at Guantanamo, the remote interrogation and detention outpost at a U.S. naval base in southeast Cuba where commanders defend the treatment of its 450 captives as humane.
In addition, the memo does not bind the CIA in its treatment of detainees because the CIA isn’t part of the Defense Department. (The CIA reportedly operates a network of secret prisons around the world for terrorism suspects and has handed over others to countries accused of using torture.)
The administration’s policy shift does repudiate a six-week burst of early Guantanamo practices, which FBI agents described in internal e-mails as involving chaining captives for so long that they urinated and defecated on themselves. Military guards or interrogators also allegedly tethered captives to dog leashes, wrapped them in Israeli flags, and exposed them to extremes of hot, cold and blasting music to break their resistance and spill secrets.
The Pentagon estimated Tuesday that it had about 14,000 captives in U.S. military custody, including 13,000 in Iraq, 550 in Afghanistan and 450 at Guantanamo.
The Pentagon announced the policy change Tuesday as Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Arlen Specter, R-Pa., convened the first of three congressional hearings on how to try war-on-terrorism captives as alleged war criminals without relying on hearsay evidence and possible secret, coercive interrogations.
In its 5-3 decision last month in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, the Supreme Court invited Congress to write a law governing military trials of detainees in the war on terrorism. At issue is how to shape a court that protects classified information, allows the government to offer a robust prosecution and permits alleged war criminals to confront their accusers within a framework of law.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., warned administration attorneys that any new war court would be modeled after the Pentagon’s Uniform Code of Military Justice — a legal system parallel to civilian courts — and would start with the assumption that terrorism suspects get the same rights as U.S. soldiers who are facing military justice, before stripping away certain rights on a case-by-case justification.
“We can get a product that will pass court muster and the nation can be proud of. If you fight that, it’s going to be a long, hot summer,” Graham, an Air Force Reserve lawyer, told Defense and Justice Department attorneys.
The Senate is unlikely to act until the fall, setting up a pitched debate over the issue at the height of the campaign for control of Congress.
The Associated Press contributed.
