{"id":926,"date":"2004-05-17T07:55:07","date_gmt":"2004-05-17T11:55:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wordpress\/2004\/05\/quaint_provisions\/"},"modified":"2004-05-17T07:55:07","modified_gmt":"2004-05-17T11:55:07","slug":"quaint_provisions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/2004\/05\/quaint_provisions\/","title":{"rendered":"Quaint Provisions"},"content":{"rendered":"

First came Seymour Hersh’s article<\/a>, which links the prison abuse at Abu Rhraib to a Pentagon strategy against al Qaeda.
\nNow there’s this<\/a>:<\/p>\n

By Jan. 25, 2002, according to a memo obtained by NEWSWEEK, it was clear that Bush had already decided that the Geneva Conventions did not apply at all, either to the Taliban or Al Qaeda. In the memo, which was written to Bush by Gonzales, the White House legal counsel told the president that Powell had “requested that you reconsider that decision.” Gonzales then laid out startlingly broad arguments that anticipated any objections to the conduct of U.S. soldiers or CIA interrogators in the future. “As you have said, the war against terrorism is a new kind of war,” Gonzales wrote to Bush. “The nature of the new war places a high premium on other factors, such as the ability to quickly obtain information from captured terrorists and their sponsors in order to avoid further atrocities against American civilians.” Gonzales concluded in stark terms: “In my judgment, this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva’s strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It’s not yet clear who planted the seeds which lead to Iraqi prison porn. But if you believe this was merely a handful of troops engaging in frat house fun, I’ve got some Niger yellowcake to sell you.
\nIt’s interesting that under the administration’s “war on terror” paradigm, basic human dignity is now a quaint notion. This is all typical of what we have seen on a number of policy fronts. The administration declares itself not bound to old, pesky standards. They obfuscate lines of authority<\/a> so when things get screwed up they can simply assert plausible deniability, benign neglect, or bureaucratic disarray (thanks to Clinton) so no one at the policy level ever gets held accountable. And thanks to a media which is generally unwilling to take stories to a degree of complexity beyond the picture-level, the ineptness continues.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

First came Seymour Hersh’s article, which links the prison abuse at Abu Rhraib to a Pentagon strategy against al Qaeda. Now there’s this: By Jan. 25, 2002, according to a memo obtained by NEWSWEEK, it was clear that Bush had already decided that the Geneva Conventions did not apply at all, either to the Taliban […]<\/p>\n<\/a>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-926","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"h-entry","8":"hentry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/926","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=926"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/926\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=926"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=926"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=926"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}