Jeff & Konnor's Blog

In 1996, Walter B. Jones Jr. (House, R-NC) met with retired Navy pilot Mike Cronin, who was tortured while in a Vietnamese prison camp during the Vietnam war. As a result of the meeting, Jones wrote legislation making violations of the Geneva Conventions a crime, so that those who use torture can be brought to justice in a U.S. civilian criminal court. The legislation, called the War Crimes Act of 1996, passed overwhelmingly. The following year, the law was amended to include the Military’s Article 3, which prohibits, among other things, “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment.” The law applies to all military or civilian abusers, foreign and domestic, in order to “set a high standard for others to follow.”

Well, never mind that last part. Fearing that U.S. personnel could be charged with war crimes in the face of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales has drafted legislation which will “repair the defects of the War Crimes Act.” By this, he means adding language that would provide exceptions, such as “an urgent need for information,” and give the Justice Department the ability to find certain interrogation methods legal under U.S. law even if they are violations of the Geneva Conventions. This type of exception would essentially make the Geneva Conventions and Article 3 unenforceable.

Donald Rumsfeld described the legislation as protecting U.S. personnel from being "charged with wrongdoing when in fact they were not engaged in wrongdoing.” This is Orwellian doublespeak for, “We made a law and violated it, so we’re going to retroactively make it not the law.”

This administration believes that a law is defective because it forces us to follow the same rules we wish to impose on everyone else. It believes that it can erase laws it has violated from history. Once again, the hypocrisy and disregard for the law continue to astonish us.