Day: September 19, 2006

Bush Adding Signing Statement to Geneva Conventions

Trish

It worked the first 750 times: You know about Bush’s signing statements: First, he signs a bill passed by both houses of Congress, the people’s representatives. Next, he signs a statement that cancels out, reverses, ignores, or undermines the letter and intent of that bill.

Since this technique has worked so well for Mr. Bush, allowing him to run things as he — and he alone — sees fit, why not expand it beyond domestic policy to international law?

Don’t like Article III of the Geneva Conventions? No problem! Just issue a clarification — aka signing statement — that says we’ll do whatever the hell we want, and the world can’t stop us because… Well, just because.

I think we should all do this. Got a hangover? Call work and say you’re sick, then sign a statement authorizing yourself to define “sick.” Having an affair? Swear to your spouse you’re true blue, then sign a statement authorizing yourself to clarify “monogamy.” Go ahead, it’s easy. I’m signing one right now authorizing myself to define “president.” Then I’m sending an email to Al Gore.

Bush Demands Retroactive Legalization of Terror Suspects’ Torture – But Why the Rush?

Jon Ponder

In the Middle Ages, waterboarding was called “the water cure.”

Upcoming Transfer of Terror Suspects from ‘Black Sites’ May Uncover U.S. Torture Program

All of this makes the case that waterboarding took place, at the very least, and that permission came from high up in the ranks — maybe as high as the Oval Office.

On September 6, the president announced that he is moving 14 terror suspects from secret “black site” prisons to Guantanamo where they will “face justice.”

When the prisoners arrive at the U.S. prison in Cuba, they will be interviewed by the Red Cross for the first time. Based on the president’s agitation and urgency regarding this issue, it seems likely these terror suspects will claim that they have been tortured by U.S. interrogators.

This could explain the torture laws sudden priority to the president. It is also interesting that Mr. Bush wants the new definitions of torture to apply retroactively, so that alleged past abuses by U. S. interrogators cannot be prosecuted, as Jonathan Turley suggested last week on Countdown:

You know, the thing that is ticking here, in terms of a clock, is the fact that these 14 guys that were recently transferred just arrived not that long ago in Gitmo in Cuba. They are going to be, or have been, interviewed by the Red Cross. Most people believe that waterboarding, they where (ph) you are held underwater until you think that you‘re going to drown. That is undeniably torture under the international standard.

If that occurs in the coming days, the United States, and specifically the president, will be accused of committing a very serious violation of international law. Torture is one of the top three or four things that the international law is designed to prevent.

And so the reason there‘s this move to try to get legislation as fast as possible is because I think the administration senses that there‘s a lot of trouble coming down this mountain.

Opposition from within his own party last week seems to have caught President Bush off guard. He nearly came unhinged on the topic when it came up in news conference on Friday.

Another report indicates there could be as many as 14,000 prisoners held by U.S. forces in various prisons in the Middle East and elsewhere. If true, the odds are close to 100 percent that prisoners will claim to have been tortured.

All of this makes the case that waterboarding took place, at the very least, and that permission came from high up in the ranks — maybe as high as the Oval Office.

Olbermann: What Would Bush Say to Jefferson?

Jon Ponder
Between your confidence in your infallibility, sir, and your demonizing of dissent, and now these rages better suited to a thwarted three-year old, you have left the unnerving sense of a White House coming unglued – a chilling suspicion that perhaps we have not seen the peak of the anger; that we can no longer forecast what next will be said to, or about, anyone who disagrees.
— Keith Olbermann

During President Bush’s mini-meltdown last Friday, brought on by former Sec. of State Colin Powell’s letter disagreeing with Bush’s plan to continue torturing terrorist suspects, the president blurted out, “It’s unacceptable to think that there’s any kind of comparison between the behavior of the United States of America and the action of Islamic extremists.”

Keith Olbermann believes that the phrase “it is unacceptable to think” should never be uttered by an American president:

[When] a President says thinking is unacceptable, even on one topic, even in the heat of the moment, even in the turning of a phrase extracted from its context, he takes us toward a new and fearful path — one heretofore the realm of science fiction authors and apocalyptic visionaries.

That flash of lightning freezes at the distant horizon, and we can just make out a world in which authority can actually suggest it has become unacceptable to think.

Thus the lightning flash reveals not merely a President we have already seen, the one who believes he has a monopoly on current truth.

It now shows us a President who has decided that of all our commanders-in-chief, ever, he alone has had the knowledge necessary to alter and re-shape our inalienable rights.

This is a frightening, and a dangerous, delusion, Mr. President.

If Mr. Powell’s letter — cautionary, concerned, predominantly supportive — can induce from you such wrath and such intolerance, what would you say were this statement to be shouted to you by a reporter, or written to you by a colleague?

“Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government.”

Those incendiary thoughts came, of course, from a prior holder of your job, Mr. Bush.

They were the words of Thomas Jefferson.

He put them in the Declaration of Independence.

Mr. Bush, what would you say to something that anti-thetical to the status quo just now?

Would you call it “unacceptable” for Jefferson to think such things, or to write them?

Between your confidence in your infallibility, sir, and your demonizing of dissent, and now these rages better suited to a thwarted three-year old, you have left the unnerving sense of a White House coming unglued – a chilling suspicion that perhaps we have not seen the peak of the anger; that we can no longer forecast what next will be said to, or about, anyone who disagrees.

GOP House Leaders Won’t Force Prison-Bound Rep. Ney to Step Down

Jon Ponder

“That’s a decision that he and his family are going to have to make.”
— GOP House Majority Leader John Boehner

Last week, Ohio GOP Rep. Bob Ney pled guilty “to federal corruption charges, admitting to prosecutors that “he had accepted tens of thousands of dollars in illegal favors from Abramoff and from a Syrian businessman nicknamed ‘the Fat Man.'”

Rep. Ney was reportedly in rehab for alcohol abuse but otherwise is still a member in good standing of the U.S. Congress. When asked if Ney should resign, GOP House Majority Leader John Boehner, who is also from Ohio, did not think so:

That’s a decision that he and his family are going to have to make.

Ney is now the poster child for GOP corruption in the Congress so it’s hard to imagine that Boehner and Speaker Denny Hastert are happy that he plans to stick around until it’s time to check in at the hoosegow. And Ney has resigned from his leadership posts.

Don’t be surprised if Ney has a change of heart and exits the stage before the election season goes into high gear.