Saturday, June 09, 2007
Marty Lederman
That's the Orwellian message from State Legal Advisor John Bellinger at the Hague on Wednesday, in
a lecture entitled "The United States and International Law."What are these "results" and "interpretations" of international law that our critics do not "prefer"?
That
"extreme sensory deprivation" is permissible.
Not to mention waterboarding.
And hypothermia.
And stress positions.
And severe sleep deprivation.
And
detaining six-year-olds in order to use them as leverage against their parents.
And
disappearances, outside the purview of
any legal system.
And renditions to nations in which torture is common, or to CIA "black sites" in Poland and Romania in which some or all of the above techniques are used.
And
refusing to cooperate with an Italian prosecution of CIA and Italian agents who engaged in such lawbreaking, even when the prosecutors are those who have been fighting terrorism for years.
And, when confronted with the evidence of such barbarism, to send Mr. Bellinger to Europe with the explanation that we can hardly be faulted because
"there is a legal murkiness that applies to international terrorism."And, to send Mr. Bellinger to Europe once again to also assert that the Convention Against Torture does not
apply at all to the armed conflict against Al Qaeda, because it is superseded by the Geneva Conventions -- treaties that the Administration insisted do nothing at all to protect our detainees. (In his Hague speech on Wednesday, Bellinger stated that "I should add that contrary to what you might hear from some critics,
no one in the United States government has sought to disregard or avoid these obligations (under the CAT)." Well, except that the Bush Administration has rendered legal opinions that (i) interpreted away to nothing the prohibition on cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, particularly overseas; (ii) insisted that the prohibition on rendition does not apply if the rendition begins in a European nation rather than in the United States; and, for good measure, (iii) concluded that the CAT is completely inapplicable to our current armed conflicts. Other than
that, we don't seek to disregard or avoid our CAT obligations.)
To his credit, Bellinger addressed these issues directly in his speech. But what he said is quite remarkable:
This Administration has worked hard to identify and implement international rules applicable to these terrorist suspects. We have not ignored, changed, or re-interpreted existing international law. In fact, last year, our Supreme Court ruled that the one provision of the Geneva Conventions that does apply, even if the Conventions as a whole do not, is Common Article 3.
Did Bellinger utter this with a straight face? The Supreme Court, of course, is not the "Administration." And the
actual Administration fought tooth and nail against that very holding for five years, because the conclusion that Common Article 3 did not apply was the critical cornerstone of its interrogation practices, which employ the "cruel treatment" CA3 forbids.
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