TORTURE ADMINISTRATION

G W Bush was a “black swan”. 9/11 was another.

There two incongruous, unscalable events lead to a torture administration despite the prohibitions of the US Constitution and the Geneva Conventions. Black Swans gather in Washington and Wall Street. Why is that?

Now the the wheel is turning. Slowly for now, but gathering velocity. The Red Cross have a report whose contents were spilled. Scott Horton thinks that the Spanish may be proceeding with a judicial investigation based on the report that could see warrants issued for many of the legal advisers for the previous US Administration, including the former Attorney-General. Spain is a member of the EU, with extradition treaties with Latin America. Scott Horton, at The Daily Beast, talks with Mark Danner “who got the scoop”. Mark Danner says:

There was no ambiguity in the report on this point. The ICRC professionals who prepared it concluded, and wrote explicitly, that the behavior they catalogued included torture, as well as cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment. They were judging the procedures used in the black sites against the Geneva Conventions (in the enforcement of which they play a formal role), the Convention Against Torture, and a number of other international agreements. Whereas in earlier reports the Red Cross used formulations that nuanced the question somewhat (saying, for instance, that Guantánamo practices were “tantamount to torture”), in this report they spoke bluntly and forcefully, saying that the conduct was torture. That of course is a violation of international law. But it is also a violation of domestic law. It is a crime, in fact.

Ray McGovern at Counter Point argues that it was not the enablers who must take responsibility but “the decider” himself. He refers to a memo of 7 February 2002 signed by Bush:

The memo amounted to an executive order, although it was not labeled as such. In it, the President alludes fulsomely to Justice Department opinions and recommendations, as well as “facts” supplied by the Defense Department.

Bush then takes clear responsibility for the decision to spurn Geneva: “I determine that common Article 3 of Geneva does not apply to either al Qaeda or Taliban detainees. … I determine that Taliban detainees … do not qualify as prisoners of war under Article 4 of Geneva … and that al Qaeda detainees also do not qualify as prisoners of war.”

Where all this goes is now in the hands of Obama. Still G W Bush is one “little black duck” will have no further need to speak Spanish. Si Amigo!

NOTE:
Reference is made to Nasim Nicholas Taleb’s, THE BLACK SWAN – The Impact of the Highly Improbable, and to a label for the official insignia of Western Australia, I heard used among my family.

ELSEWHERE:

I should have known, Glenn Greenwald has the background on the Spanish connection. As a global society, international law should not be a novel idea, although perhaps the institutional framework is more scaffolding than the structure of the building.

David Corn’s question to the President’s Press Secretary was defected by what passed for humour.

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