Sunday, NYT - Page 1
In early November 2001, with Americans still staggered by the Sept. 11 attacks, a small group of White House officials worked in great secrecy to devise a new system of justice for the new war they had declared on terrorism.
Let's think about that. We live in a country in which political appointees of the executive can gather "in great secrecy" to constuct "a new system of justice." Just get your head around that one.
White House officials said their use of extraordinary powers would allow the Pentagon to collect crucial intelligence and mete out swift, unmerciful justice. "We think it guarantees that we'll have the kind of treatment of these individuals that we believe they deserve," said Vice President Dick Cheney, who was a driving force behind the policy.
Uh-huh. This cabal is led by Dick Cheney. Now, if a lawyer were the driving force behind this, I don't think I would feel one bit better. But at least a lawyer would draw on his or her experience with, you know, the law, in devising this "new system of justice."
We've cleared whole forests of paper developing procedures for these tribunals, and no one has been tried yet," said Richard L. Shiffrin, who worked on the issue as the Pentagon's deputy general counsel for intelligence matters. "They just ended up in this Kafkaesque sort of purgatory."
You think? If I were the kind of man who doubted his own government, I might mistake this whole charade for a Kafka tale.
Military lawyers were largely excluded from that process in the days after Sept. 11. They have since waged a long struggle to ensure that terrorist prosecutions meet what they say are basic standards of fairness. Uniformed lawyers now assigned to defend Guantánamo detainees have become among the most forceful critics of the Pentagon's own system.
Yeah. God forbid someone consult military lawyers to construct military law in this "new system of justice." Might end up too much like the "old system of justice."
Mr. Yoo (John Yoo, Dept. Of Justice, Office of Legal Counsel) listed an inventory of possible operations: shooting down a civilian airliner hijacked by terrorists; setting up military checkpoints inside an American city; employing surveillance methods more sophisticated than those available to law enforcement; or using military forces "to raid or attack dwellings where terrorists were thought to be, despite risks that third parties could be killed or injured by exchanges of fire."
This guy was 34 at the time. He, and others like him, conducted the most massive re-alignment of U.S. military law in the past 60 years. Mr. Yoo is not even a military lawyer, much less an elected official. This article is pretty clear that even Bush himself was only tangentially aware of new directives as they were being constructed.
There really isn't anything new in this article, that is, if you've been paying close attention. I've read about all of this, just not in one place. Nor has all this been spelled out so clearly before. For me, it's an excellent synthesis of three years of legal abuse.
Full Article. Much more abuse.
Posted by mike at October 24, 2004 07:34 PM