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The Daily Dish - 2006-2011 archives for The Daily Dish, featuring Andrew Sullivan

If Americans Will Not Defend The Geneva Conventions ...

By The Daily Dish
Apr 29 2009, 2:27 AM ET

... then the rest of the civilized world will have to take a stand against the now documented war crimes of high officials in the American government:

Judge Garz’s decision revealed a deep engagement with documents which had been released in Washington in the last two weeks, particularly a group of memoranda prepared by lawyers in the Bush Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) a report of the Senate Armed Services Committee and a memo released by the Senate Intelligence Committee, making it likely that he would focus on the authors of the torture memoranda and other lawyers who worked with them.



The OLC memoranda gave a green light to the use of techniques such as waterboarding, hypothermia, stress positions, sleep deprivation up to eleven days and confinement in a coffin-like environment with stinging insects in exploitation of a prisoner’s phobias with respect to specific prisoners, demonstrating that the lawyers had been deeply engaged in the process of application of torture techniques and not merely giving abstract legal guidance. ...

Spanish lawyers close to the case tell me that under applicable Spanish law, the Obama administration has the power to bring the proceedings in Spain against former Bush administration officials to a standstill. “All it has to do is launch its own criminal investigation through the Justice Department,” said one lawyer working on the case, “that would immediately stop the case in Spain.”

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