'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

How Hiiiiiigh can you go?

I admit I'm really enjoying seeing this whole war-crimes prosecution unfolding regarding the Abu Ghraib guards.

As I predicted, the first bunch of indictees there who are actually (unlike Sivits) contesting their cases, are building a defense of "I was following orders". Quite rightly, the Nuremberg Principles spell out that--in any situation where, as in the case of the Abu Ghraib guards, the individuals concerned have the possibility of exercizing moral choice-- the "following orders" claim cannot provide a complete defense. But it can still, certainly, be a relavant factor in any trial of a person lower down the chain of command...

And along the way there, we'll get more and more and more information about just how high up the chain of command the orders and directives encouraging those cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatments came from.

This could all last for months-- especially if further indictments, further and further up the chain of command, get handed out. As they certainly should. Given what we already know, from the leaked memos, from the record of Geoffrey Miller being transferred from Gitmo to Abu Ghraib, etc., etc., this whole detainee-abuse issue is going to be bubbling and rattling away there on a front- or medium burner, news-wise, right through next November 2.

Excellent.

I've just been reading through the WaPo's piece on the bundle of documents that the the White House, Justice Dept etc released today on detainee-treatment issues...

There's White House counsel Alberto Gonzalez, asserting there that:

We also conclude that the president has the plenary constitutional power to suspend our treaty obligations toward Afghanistan during the period of the conflict. He may exercise that discretion on the basis that Afghanistan was a failed state.

How's that again?? Is there anything in the Geneva Conventions or the US Constitution that provides for any exceptions in cases where the US becomes militarily involved with a failed state? What on earth kind of a nonsense is that???

And then, in a sleazy, CYA version of a good-cop-bad-cop routine, there's the Prez himself, graciously "declining" to use the power to "suspend" the Geneva Convention restrictions in this case:

I accept the legal conclusion of the Attorney General and the Department of Justice that I have the authority under the Constitution to suspend Geneva as between the United States and Afghanistan, but I decline to exercise that authority at this time...

But then, he's the one to try to make this scumball of an argument:

Our nation recognizes that this new paradigm -- ushered in not by us, but by terrorists -- requires new thinking in the law of war.

Ya know what, George? First of all, I'll get over my sheer disbelief at the proposition that you've ever spent any time in your life doing even the first set of "thinking" in the law of war. (Make that "laws of war," as the rest of us refer to them.) Let alone that you've seen the need for any "new" thinking.

And then I'll remind you that the laws of war were formulated precisely to deal with all the very hard cases. That includes cases of terrorism. It certainly includes cases of state failure.

And then I'll just remind you that the most basic element of the "rule of law", at a domestic level or at the global level, is that there is one law for all, not special categories of law for special categories of persons. That's the beauty of the laws of war: by design, they make no distinction between people on the 'good' side of a war, and people on the 'bad' side. It is one law for all...

George? George??

Oh shucks, he ain't listening. I'll just talk to the rest of you then.

Some of the other documents described in the WaPo piece seem really interesting, too; though they don't seem to add very much to what we knew already...

Vermont Sen. Pat Leahy is quoted there as saying:

Though this is a self-serving selection, at least it is a beginning. But for the Judiciary Committee and the Senate to find the whole truth, we will need much more cooperation and extensive hearings.

Actually, what I was planning to write about when I started cruising the WaPo website, was this story there reoprting that Col. James Pohl, the military judge in the court-martial in Baghdad that's trying Graner, Frederick, and Davis, ruled that the defense attorneys could call anyone in the military chain of command right up to General Abizaid to testify in their behalf.

I had been a little concerned the first time I heard this story (on the BBC) that it seemed that Pohl had ruled out calling in any of the civilian higher-up-yets to whom Abizaid and the rest of the generals report.

But Pohl did not totally rule that out. According to that WaPo story, he,

left open the possibility that he could require the government to turn them over at some point if defense attorneys are able to link what happened in Iraq with policy decisions made in Washington.

"Quite frankly, what they do in Washington, D.C., you have to connect it," Pohl told the attorneys.

So that may well be what we see happening, all through these summer months ahead.

How hiiiigh will they go, indeed?