Lies Catching Up to Bush Administration

Famed journalist I.F. Stone warned "All governments are run by liars and nothing they say should be believed."

Like in many other aspects of government, the Bush administration has veered to the extreme in its mendacity.

Guantánamo Bay holds only the worst of the worst, the administration repeatedly assured the American public after preventing examination of the evidence holding the accused.

Turns out the administration (as McClatchy news demonstrated in its America's prison for terrorists often held the wrong men in mid-June) is the worst of the worst in its commitment to bald-faced lying.

Today's Post and Times report on the duplicity of the administration that contends in legal arguments that because the Chinese government said so and the assertions were repeated several times by American officials, accused terrorist, Huzaifa Parhat, a Uighur Muslim who fled a persecuting Chinese government, must be a terrorist.

The argument was ridiculed and dismissed by a conservative, unanimous appellate panel:

From the Times:

With some derision for the Bush administration’s arguments, a three-judge panel said the government contended that its accusations against the detainee should be accepted as true because they had been repeated in at least three secret documents.

The court compared that to the absurd declaration of a character in the Lewis Carroll poem “The Hunting of the Snark”: “I have said it thrice: What I tell you three times is true.” ...

The Uighur Muslims, who come from an area of far western China they call East Turkestan, claim oppression at the hands of the Chinese government, including forced abortions and relocations of educated people to remote areas.

The Chinese government has described the East Turkestan Islamic Movement as a terrorist organization. American officials agreed in 2002, when they were pressing for Chinese support for military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq.

See the opinion at Huzaifa Parhat v. Robert M. Gates et al (No 06-1307).

Secret Torturing US Government

From Tom Lasseter at McClatchy:

The framework under which detainees were imprisoned for years without charges at Guantanamo and in many cases abused in Afghanistan wasn't the product of American military policy or the fault of a few rogue soldiers.

It was largely the work of five White House, Pentagon and Justice Department lawyers who, following the orders of President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, reinterpreted or tossed out the U.S. and international laws that govern the treatment of prisoners in wartime, according to former U.S. defense and Bush administration officials. ...

American Concern for Human Rights Waning

McClatchy's America's prison for terrorists often held innocent men piece yesterday ought to have produced screaming headlines and constant chatter about the crimes that the Bush administration had committed at Guantanamo.

The findings by the comprehensive, unprecedented McClatchy interviews "...conducted with former Guantanamo detainees by a U.S. news organization" and US officials talking on background produced nothing of the kind, telling us much about the politcal culture.

In sum, the administration tortured innocents who they knew to be innocent, devised a legal framework to shield the US government from being held accountable, and broke the international laws on human rights self-consciously and shamelessly.

Among the findings:

- A series of White House directives placed 'suspected enemy combatants' beyond the reach of U.S. law or the 1949 Geneva Conventions' protections for prisoners of war. President Bush and Congress then passed legislation that protected those detention rules.

- In 2002, a CIA analyst interviewed several dozen detainees at Guantanamo and reported to senior National Security Council officials that many of them didn't belong there, a former White House official said.

- Despite the analyst's findings, the administration made no further review of the Guantanamo detainees. The White House had determined that all of them were enemy combatants, the former official said.

- Rather than taking a closer look at whom they were holding, a group of five White House, Justice Department and Pentagon lawyers who called themselves the 'War Council' devised a legal framework that enabled the administration to detain suspected 'enemy combatants' indefinitely with few legal rights.

The threat of new terrorist attacks, the War Council argued, allowed President Bush to disregard or rewrite American law, international treaties and the Uniform Code of Military Justice to permit unlimited detentions and harsh interrogations.

- The group further argued that detainees had no legal right to defend themselves, and that American soldiers — along with the War Council members, their bosses and Bush — should be shielded from prosecution for actions that many experts argue are war crimes.

- With the support of Bush, Cheney and then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, the group shunted aside the military justice system, and in February 2002, Bush suspended the legal protection for detainees spelled out in Common Article Three of the 1949 Geneva Convention on prisoners of war, which outlaws degrading treatment and torture.

Today a Washington Post piece, Report Questions Pentagon Accounts,
Officials Looked Into Interrogation Methods Early On, contains similar revelations.