I think torture is pretty bad, but clearly the Rwandan genocide was worse. Gourevitch paints perhaps the best picture that can be painted for the gacaca courts and “full reckoning”. Notably, the Rwandans managed this without much help from the international community, though there were also trials at the court in Tanzania. And Gourevitch isn’t saying this is great. Merely that it can be done without re-rending the political fabric of a country.

I’d like to see some trials. But I do fear the possible political backlash, too, so I’m uncertain what would be the most successful way forward. I’m just trying to put Gourevitch in context and give him some due, without entirely agreeing with him.

So, not only did Bush cram his Torture Policy and Plan down the throats of the Uniformed Chain of Command, he didn’t hesitate to put ‘team players’ in where he met resistance.

So, the Repubs were FOR cramdown before they were against it!

Many thanks to Mary and radiofreewill for the excellent summaries.

nothing less than Treason Against the Constitution

I sure agree with that!

You’ve masterfully assembled the pieces. And explained where we are now.

I remember hearing that the military units were being kept in the dark, news blackouts about any American unrest with BushCo. Fox News was broadcast to the troops nonstop, however.

I assume there was a time when it was off limits to surf FDL and TheNextHurrah. If true, I wonder if the US military allows Emptywheel and FDL through the iron curtain now?

What Bush and Gonzales did to DoJ – Politicized it in the name of an Authority Above the Law; Rumsfeld and Haynes attempted to do at DoD.

As more and more of the story gets put together, imvho, the picture that is emerging is one where We can actually *see* a clearly defined Good Guy – the Uniformed Military – resisting Bush’s Most Powerful Efforts to Politicize the Geneva Conventions – using the Lawyers of the President, Vice-President, DoD, CIA, OLC and others to put maximum pressure on the Uniformed Military Chain of Command to Adopt the Harsh Interrogations fig-leaf for Torture, as Policy.

Lehnert says No. He’s gone. Dunlavey says No. He’s gone. Miller says Yes.

There. The Chain of Command facts have been fixed to fit Bush’s Torture Policy – just like Geneva was fixed by re-interpreting some of its facts.

Bush and Rumsfeld finally got a guy in there who thought like they did – was Ideologically sympathetic to the ’cause’ – that believed, ultimately, that Bush’s Word as the UE was the Law – and if Bush secretly said that his ‘interpretation’ of cruel and inhuman treatment trumped the ’statutory’ reading of the Geneva Conventions – well, then, it did!

So, not only did Bush cram his Torture Policy and Plan down the throats of the Uniformed Chain of Command, he didn’t hesitate to put ‘team players’ in where he met resistance.

If investigative authorities could ever possibly get their arms around the scale of Bush’s Mis-use of Power, this would be a clear-cut case of Unlawful Command Influence against Bush as the CIC.

On a deeper level, imvho, Consciously conspiring to circumvent the Geneva Conventions, one of Our Congressionally Ratified Treaty Obligations, is nothing less than Treason Against the Constitution.

When the dust finally settles, I think We’ll find that the Republic was Saved because the Uniformed Military stood their ground and defended the Geneva Conventions against Bush’s Ideology-Over-the-Rule-of-Law assault – and that, ultimately, when Bush lost the support of the Military, he was left the Omnipotent UE in name only – no longer able to back up any threats to suspend the Congress and place the Country under Martial Law in his Phony War on Terror.

Miller says Yes, and what do we find at Abu Ghraib? Bush’s Harsh Interrogation Programme on full display in living color in the hands of ‘a few bad apples.’

How much of the OPR report is classified (if any) will be important too. Keep in mind that state bar associations aren’t going to have classified clearance and wouldn’t actually be likely to support having “secret evidence” given to them to take action on vis a vis an attorney complaint.

IOW – don’t expect much from the state bars – unless there is a lot I don’t expect to see in that report, they aren’t holding a lot of cards when it will come to pursuing discipline.

The original commander at GITMO absolutely wouldn’t play ball on torture.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/…..02313.html

In Jan 2002, Marine Brig. Gen. Michael Lehnert deployed to GITMO.

Lehnert said he had been told by the Joint Chiefs of Staff that the Geneva Conventions would not technically apply to his mission: He was to act in a manner “consistent with” the conventions (as the mantra went) but not to feel bound by them.
…
Lehnert told me that he felt he had no choice but to rely on the regulations already in place, ones in which the military was well schooled: the Uniform Code of Military Justice, other U.S. laws and, above all, the Geneva Conventions. The detainees, no matter what their official status, were essentially to be considered enemy prisoners of war, a status that mandated basic standards of humane treatment
…
The task force set to work around the clock, processing the detainees upon arrival, administering medical treatment and providing general care in the cells of the newly built Camp X-Ray. Lehnert’s lawyers studied the 143 articles of the Geneva Conventions, paying particular attention to Common Article 3, which prohibits “humiliating and degrading treatment.”

Lehnert tries to set up a ICRC visit, to get input from them on handling of the prisoners. He gets shut down – finally one of his guys (Supervielle) gets exasperated and calls ICRC himself, despite being told that Rumsfeld was against the ICRC getting access.

Remember that by Dec 2001, DoD was already investigating the use of SERE derived torture techniques. Now the ICRC has been called to the Den in Inequity. The ICRC shows up in Jan 2002 and fairly quickly:

Brig. Gen. Lehnert had built his own Guantanamo, one with ICRC oversight, a Muslim chaplain and an overriding ethos that stressed codified law and the unwritten rules of human decency. Lehnert’s team let the detainees talk among themselves; it provided halal food, an additional washing bucket inside cells that lacked toilet facilities, a Koran for each detainee, skullcaps and prayer beads for those who wanted them, and undergarments for the prisoners to wear at shower time, in accordance with Islamic laws that proscribe public nakedness.

By the end of Jan 2002, Rumsfeld was pissy that he hadn’t gotten good intel from the human flotsam he had purchased for interrogations, so he decided to create a parallel chain of command at GITMO, bringing in Dunlavey, “a former U.S. Army interrogator during the Vietnam War.” About that time, the original crew began to realize that they wouldn’t be building a courtroom. Some isolation torture facilities maybe, but not so much the courtroom they had been expecting.

As Dunlavey’s command took shape in late February and early March, the fabric of prisoner’s rights that Lehnert had woven was beginning to unravel. By the end of February, nearly 200 detainees had mounted a hunger strike to protest their treatment. Interrogations, not trials, had become the future of Guantanamo.

After Lehnert works to wind down the hunger strike by actually treating the detainees like they were human beings – his butt gets kicked off the island. Dunlavey gets the run of the joint and by summer … everyone is AGAIN wondering why they aren’t getting any good intel out of GITMO (and btw, Sibel Edmonds and the “tomato/cash” story and others are highlighting that they don’t have decent translation even for the detainees who are talking).

Cut to Mayer’s book, where “in late summer” the CIA is sending a specialist to the see what the problem is and he comes back with a report (a written report – one we haven’t seen yet) that says — a big problem is that you have about 1/3 complete non-combatants down there, and of the mujahadeen fighters you have there, a big chunk had nothing to do with al-Qaeda or the Taleban. IOW – a big chunk of “protected persons” under the GCs where illegally shipped to GITMO and have now been subject to the human interrogation experiments being conducted there and the abuse involved in those experiments.

Whether that predated or postdated Yoo’s August memo would be nice to know. In any event, Bellinger sets up a meeting with the analyst and a ret Gen consultant to the NSC, they go off to see Gonzales (dates would be nice – I’m not sure if anything about this is in the SSCI report) and lo and behold, Flanigan and Addington are there waiting for them and tell them that “they aren’t innocent if the President says they are gulity” or something along those lines (Addington – the President has said they are enemy combatants – please use that term – and we won’t revisit that).

In the context of all of that -
soliciations of torture info in at least Dec 2001;
Lehnert and decency deliberately removed;
memos on torture solicited; and
direct briefing that many of the detainees are innocent (and btw, Dunlavey tells the CIA analyst that he (Dunlavey) thinks the number who were never any kind of combatant at all is closer to 50%, bc they didn’t bother to have the analyst interview any of the old/on walkers infirm, children and the mentally infirm and if you factor them in, the numbers explode) -

– the Addington crew takes there Sept torture field trip.

And by then, even Dunlavey isn’t what they wanted – he has some pushback. Good thing for them they have Miller.

And one more problem. None of the OLC memos even pretended to try to tackle the problem of the UCMJ rules on treatment of detainees, that existed separate and apart from the GCs. How were those dealt with?

By Haynes issuing an opinion? Nope, by the Beaver memorandum – a thrown together memo by a lower ranking officer without good research support stationed at GITMO, who spits out an opinion that says – eh, it’s ok to violate the UCMJ if your superior officer orders you to.

Thanks for the response.

Bush says CA3GC doesn’t apply to Taliban and Al Qaeda, but that the US will treat the Detainees in accordance with the ‘principles of Geneva.’

I’m suggesting that the Uniformed Military, very early on, had made it clear to Bush that they could not go along with Violating the Geneva Conventions.

To make that work, I’m saying that Bush had to ‘pixie dust’ Geneva and re-interpret its key terms (Bybee One) so he could Secretly Torture ‘legally’ (Bybee Two) and still say Publicly that he was staying within the bounds of the principles of Geneva – which Bush claimed he was doing all the time.

Yes, the Supremes finally called Bush on his erroneous rejection of Geneva as not applying to Al Qaeda and the Taliban in 2006, but by then Bush was already four years into Secret Full-Blown Torture through his Secret OLC-approved Harsh Interrogations Programme.

I’m saying that Addington, Gonzo, Yoo, Haynes, Rizzo and friends knew what they were doing – they were fixing the Geneva facts to fit the Bush Torture Policy in at Gitmo – despite all the assurances of ‘good faith’ Publicly proferred by Bush.