The Undoing Begins --WHBriefing --Froomkin --WaPo

[Demeter]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/blog/2006/07/11/BL2006071100650.html?referrer=email

The Undoing Begins

By Dan Froomkin
Special to washingtonpost.com
Tuesday, July 11, 2006; 1:36 PM



Today's dramatic announcement from the White House that U.S. detainees are covered by the Geneva Convention is the first of what may be several major policy reversals forced by the recent Supreme Court decision curbing President Bush's assertion of nearly unlimited executive power in a time of war.

" 'It's not really a reversal of policy,' Snow asserted, calling the Supreme Court decision 'complex.' "

But will the new official adherence to the Geneva Conventions actually change anything? Maybe not, if the administration continues to be allowed to define its own terms in private.

Wilkerson's Questions

I've written several times before about Larry Wilkerson, the former chief of staff to secretary of state Colin Powell.

In October , he went public with his observation that a secret cabal led by the vice president had hijacked U.S. foreign policy, inveigled the president, condoned torture and crippled the ability of the government to respond to emergencies.

In November , he said that he had documented a paper trail tracing the practice of prisoner abuse by U.S. soldiers directly back to Vice President Cheney's office.

Today, Wilkerson writes on NiemanWatchdog.org that the media should demand that Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld explain their past conduct -- and definitively state what they consider to be torture.

Niemanwatchdog.org is the other Web site I work for, and I asked Wilkerson to write something on this issue. His central point: "here is enough evidence for a soldier of long service -- someone like me with 31 years in the Army -- to know that what started with John Yoo, David Addington, Alberto Gonzales, William Haynes at the Pentagon and several others, all under the watchful and willing eye of the Vice President, went down through the Secretary of Defense to the commanders in the field, and created two separate pressures that resulted in the violation of longstanding practice and law."

[Sherman A1]

1. Those darn activist

judges

[bemildred]

2. If I had to bet, I'd bet on the "response" being 100% bullshit. nt