NYT: Terror and Presidential Power: Bush Takes a Step Back

[kskiska]

WASHINGTON, July 11 — From the outset, President Bush declared that the battle against Al Qaeda would be a war like no other, fought by new rules against new enemies not entitled to the old protections afforded to either prisoners of war or criminal defendants.

But the White House acknowledgment on Tuesday that a key clause of the Geneva Conventions applies to Qaeda detainees, as a recent Supreme Court ruling affirmed, is only the latest step in the gradual erosion of the administration’s aggressive legal stance.

The administration’s initial position emerged in 2002 only after a fierce internal legal debate, and it has been revised in the face of international opinion, Congressional curbs and Supreme Court rulings. Two central ideas of the war on terror — that the president could fight it exclusively on the basis of his constitutional powers and that terrorist suspects had few, if any, rights — have been modified repeatedly.

Scholars debated the meaning of a Defense Department memo made public on Tuesday that declared that the clause in the Geneva Conventions, Common Article 3, “applies as a matter of law to the conflict with Al Qaeda.”

more…
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/12/washington/12detain.html?hp&ex=1152676800&en=1049c4d41c477faa&ei=5094&partner=homepage

[rodeodance]

1. bushco takes what he can when he can.

[rodeodance]

2. "the memo only restated what was already policy — "--oh those creeps

are so good with minsing words!

......Administration officials suggested that the memo only restated what was already policy — that detainees must be treated “humanely.” But what was undeniable was that the president’s executive order of Feb. 7, 2002, declared that Article 3 did not apply to Al Qaeda or to Taliban detainees, and that the newly released memo, written by Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon R. England, said it did.

After the Pentagon released the memo, the White House confirmed that it had formally withdrawn part of the 2002 order and accepted that Article 3 now applied to Qaeda detainees. That article prohibits “humiliating and degrading treatment” of prisoners and requires trials “affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples.”

“This is an important course correction, and there are political ramifications to it,” said Scott L. Silliman, an expert on the law of war at Duke University. Top defense officials “never really clarified when Geneva applied and when it didn’t,” he said.

Richard H. Kohn, a military historian at the University of North Carolina, said the administration might have anticipated that it would have to adjust its policies, formed under immense pressure after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

[Demeter]

3. Bush Handed His Head

So, will Yoo, Gonzales, and other enablers be fired? I didn't think so.