Tuesday, October 26, 2004

American War Crimes

The Washington Post broke a story about the CIA's removal of prisoners from Iraq, although this appears to violate the Geneva Conventions. According to the Post, the Justice Department wrote a memo in defense of the practice. Although the memo was stamped "draft" and apparently never finalized, it was circulated to other agencies, and the CIA relied on it in undertaking the removals or "renditions."

On Sunday, the New York Times had a long article on the rewriting of military law after 9/11 to allow sending prisoners to Guantanamo, where the administration expected them to be beyond the reach of the US judicial system. The article says that the White House proponents of this system kept lawyers from other agencies -- including uniformed military lawyers and State Department lawyers -- out of the process because the White House considered them too soft.

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