From liberators to war crimes tribunals in a few short months

I have accused the Bush administration of much that is venal, nefarious, stupid [insert your adjective here], but I have generally not gone quite as far as some of my blogging colleagues by making criminal charges against Bush & Co. But Newsweek's exposure of White House counsel Gonzales memorandum recommending sloughing off the "quaint" niceties of the Geneva Convention -- and Bush's apparent approval of that recommendation -- takes the game to an entirely new level. While first arguing that "a new paradigm" is required in fighting the war on terror, Gonzalez goes much further, arguing that they have to drop the conventions or else -- in an odd bit of logic -- members of the military as well as members of the current administration could be subject to war crimes investigations in a subsequent administration.

Gonzales also argued that dropping Geneva would allow the president to "preserve his flexibility" in the war on terror. His reasoning? That U.S. officials might otherwise be subject to war-crimes prosecutions under the Geneva Conventions. Gonzales said he feared "prosecutors and independent counsels who may in the future decide to pursue unwarranted charges" based on a 1996 U.S. law that bars "war crimes," which were defined to include "any grave breach" of the Geneva Conventions. As to arguments that U.S. soldiers might suffer abuses themselves if Washington did not observe the conventions, Gonzales argued wishfully to Bush that "your policy of providing humane treatment to enemy detainees gives us the credibility to insist on like treatment for our soldiers."

As Fred Kaplan writes in Slate, this puts the scandal of Abu Ghraib at the very welcome mat outside the Oval Office. While I don't accuse Bush of authorization the activities in Abu Ghraib, not only did he and Rumsfeld permit a climate where such abuses appeared to be condoned, they clearly were aware that the climate they were creating could lead to actions that violate the War Crimes Act.

Via Andrew Sullivan, Mark Bowden weighs in on Abu Ghraib.

The Bush Administration has tried to walk a dangerous line in these matters. The President has spoken out against torture, but his equivocations on the terms of the Geneva Convention suggest that he perceives wiggle room between ideal and practice. There are reports that Administration lawyers quietly drafted a series of secret legal opinions last year that codified the "aggressive" methods of interrogation permitted at U.S. detention facilities?which, if true, effectively authorized in advance the use of coercion.

Perhaps the most disturbing evidence of this mindset was Donald Rumsfeld's long initial silence on the Abu Ghraib photos. His failure to alert the President or congressional leaders before the photos became public?and he knew they were going to become public?leads one to conclude that he didn't think they were a very big deal. If so, this reveals him to be astonishingly tone-deaf, or worse. Maybe he simply wasn't shocked.

Now, there is a silver lining. Alberto Gonzales won't likely be a candidate for Chief Justice.