Not to spend all day quoting excerpts from Jane Mayer‘s book, but she simply has the Bush administration dead to rights. A Spanish court recently agreed to consider opening a criminal investigation into six Bush administration officials over allegations that they provided legal cover for torture at Guantanamo Bay. Satyam Kanna writes at Thinkprogress that former undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith claims to have “strongly championed a policy of respect for Geneva, and I did not recommend that the President set aside Common Article 3.” In fact, Mayer reported in The Dark Side that Feith had long opposed Geneva protections for terrorists even as far back as the Reagan administration, when the organization in question was the PLO. A Nexis search shows that Feith’s opposition to extending Geneva protections to terrorists in the 1980s is a matter of public record.
Of course, in Feith’s mind, “respect” may not be the same thing as “compliance.” And since the Bush administration argued that the Geneva Conventions simply didn’t apply to “unlawful combatants” it may simply be that Feith doesn’t think the Conventions were violated simply because, in these cases, they didn’t apply. But I’m not sure that would pass muster on the inside of a courtroom, were Feith to see one.
— A. Serwer
