JURIST Guest Columnist Benjamin Davis of the University of Toledo College of Law says official US calls for "clarifying" the Geneva Conventions are part of a ploy to limit their application and enable prisoners to be treated outside the law without inviting culpability for war crimes and torture...
State Department Legal Adviser John Bellinger III has called for "clarification" of Geneva Conventions in the margins of the 30th international conference of the International Committee of the Red Cross/Red Crescent in Geneva (see this report on JURIST).
Bellinger said,
[The Conventions] do not apply to every situation. They in fact apply to conflicts between states. So therefore the Geneva Conventions do not give you the answers about who can be held in a conflict with a non-state actor. They do not tell you how long you can hold someone in a conflict with a non-state actor. They do not tell you what countries to return people to. In a normal conflict where one is fighting one or maybe two countries, at the end of the conflict you return the combatants to those countries. In fighting al-Qaida we've found that we have detained individuals from more than two dozen countries around the world. The Geneva Conventions do not provide answers to those questions so they don't provide sufficient guidance to countries as to what law to apply.
http://jurist.law.pitt.edu/forumy/2007/11/clarifying-geneva-conventions-...
More BS by administration operatives to justify their policy of torture and rendition. I would never have thought this country would come to this pass where we justify brutality. No wonder we have lost our moral standing in the world.
"If there is one lesson from the torture debates it is that there is an almost unending availability of clever lawyers willing to build up sandcastle analyses to enable the sovereign to argue that what he/she is doing is perfectly legal. As long as those lawyers can include an Attorney General willing to see this as misfeasance the clever lawyer gets off scot-free as does the sovereign who sought the legal advice to allow the illegality. "
Who is the author of the quote?
Chico, the quote is taken from the same article that Swampbubbles cited. I just wanted to highlight it.
...when the Reich had citizens serving from France, Denmark, Holland, Austira (which returned to sovereign status after World War II), and the Ukraine as members of the Waffen SS. Apparently, our grandfathers were better able to deal with such complexities than their gandsons.
This is a little off subject here, but I didn't want to start a whole new thread. This is just in from Reuters: "A new U.S. intelligence report says Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 and it remains on hold, contradicting the Bush administration's earlier assertion that Tehran was intent on developing a bomb."
I don't believe -nor do I think very many others believe- anything that comes out of the mouths of this administration any more. They have proved themselves to be lying sons-of-bitches every time they open their mouths. They have shown themselves capable of anything, lying, cheating, wars of aggression, torture. They've tried it all. The Republic will be a helluva lot better off when Bush & Co. are gone. And it'll take a generation or more for us to recover from this jackass and his cronies.
http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSWBT00801220071203