Obsolete and Quaint
May 17th, 2004 • Posted in: What They're Saying“As you have said, the war against terrorism is a new kind of war. 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. In my judgment, this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva’s strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions.”
– White House counsel Alberto Gonzalez, in a written memo to President Bush on January 25, 2002, endorsing a plan to ignore portions of the Geneva Conventions when interrogating captured members of the Taliban or al Qaeda. The policy was adopted by Bush, whose use of sweeping executive powers to designate captured fighters as “enemy combatants” without the protection of traditional laws, has prompted legal challenges currently before the U.S. Supreme Court. The newly revealed memo, quoted in Newsweek, has raised the question of “whether the Bush administration set up a legal foundation that opened the door for the mistreatment” of Iraqi prisoners now making headlines, according to the Associated Press. ( Newsweek, May 24; AP, May 17)
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[...] Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who made similar statements about the Geneva Conventions’ ban on torture as White House Counsel: As you have said, the war against terrorism is a new kind of war. The [...]