What Geneva Conventions? NYT review; CHAIN OF COMMAND

[Englander]

By MICHAEL IGNATIEFF
Published: October 17, 2004, Sunday
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D0CE6DF143BF934A25753C1A9629C8B63


CHAIN OF COMMAND
The Road From 9/11 to Abu Ghraib.
By Seymour M. Hersh.
394 pp. HarperCollins Publishers. $36.95.


>>''CHAIN OF COMMAND'' is the best book we are likely to have, this close to events, about why the United States went from leading an international coalition, united in horror at the attacks of 9/11, to fighting alone in Iraq and, in Abu Ghraib, to violating the very human rights it said it had come to restore.

>>According to Seymour M. Hersh, whose revelations this spring about the Abu Ghraib scandal have matched in impact his breaking of the My Lai story in 1969, this fatal declension was a direct consequence of presidential decisions taken long before combat in Iraq. The war on terror began as a defense of international law, giving America allies and friends. It soon became a war in defiance of law. In a secret order dated Feb. 7, 2002, President Bush declared, as Hersh puts it, that ''when it came to Al Qaeda the Geneva Conventions were applicable only at his discretion.'' Based on memorandums from the Defense and Justice Departments and the White House legal office that, in Anthony Lewis's apt words, ''read like the advice of a mob lawyer to a mafia don on how to . . . stay out of prison,'' Bush unilaterally withdrew the war on terror from the international legal regime that sets the standards for treatment and interrogation of prisoners. Abu Ghraib was not the work of a few bad apples, but the direct consequence, Hersh says, of ''the reliance of George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld on secret operations and the use of coercion -- and eye-for-an-eye retribution -- in fighting terrorism.''

>> At the end of the book, Hersh confesses that he still hasn't got the whole story. ''There is so much about this presidency that we don't know, and may never learn,'' he writes. ''How did they do it? How did eight or nine neoconservatives who believed that war in Iraq was the answer to international terrorism get their way? How did they redirect the government and rearrange longstanding American priorities and policies with so much ease? How did they overcome the bureaucracy, intimidate the press, mislead the Congress and dominate the military? Is our democracy that fragile?''

>>Yes, our democracy is that fragile. Checks and balances in the American constitutional system are functioning poorly. With some creditable exceptions -- Senators Byrd, Kennedy, Biden come to mind -- Congress did not subject the case for war to critical scrutiny. The courts deferred for too long to presidential authority, and only now with the recent Supreme Court decision, on the rights of enemy combatants at Guantánamo Bay, that ''a state of war is not a blank check for the president,'' have they begun to claw back some of their prerogatives of judicial review. Nor, in the lead-up to war, did the press, Hersh included, subject the administration case on weapons of mass destruction to the critical scrutiny it cried out for. They were taken for a ride, and so were we. <<


* is not yet 60,is he? He can look forward to being labelled a "war criminal" for many years to come....