The Big Picture and the Closeup

The Boumediene case was another “win” for the Guantanamo detainees. But with nobody leaving Guantanamo without permission on Bush and Cheney’s watch, the Administration is the real winner.

A lawyer so brilliant he could not recognize when his own advice was bad: for his client, the President, and for the country. Disbar John Yoo.

The Big Picture Home Page | Previous Big Picture Column |  Next Big Picture Column Musharraf, Mukasey, and Checks and Balances Published in the Maryland Daily Record November 26, 2007 This month, the lawyers of Pakistan have been in the streets, and closer to home the Senate has agonized over the Michael Mukasey nomination for Attorney General. […]

It may have been lousy intelligence. It was effective public relations, however. In February 2003, 72 percent of Americans polled answered yes to the question: “Was Saddam Hussein personally involved in the September 11 attacks?” And this result was in line with poll after poll.

And here is the moral, strategic, and tactical problem: How we can expect the world to accord full faith and credit to that court’s eventual verdict when we establish and countenance tribunals that are themselves human rights violations? A question urgently worth pondering.

In the global war on terror or, as the Bush Administration likes to call it, the GWOT, the U.S. aspires to the situation of a National League team in interleague play — relaxed rules. This time we consider three aspects of the relaxed GWOT away game we are playing these days: foreign assassinations, extraordinary rendition, and prisoner export.

When the International Committee of the Red Cross reported in February 2004 on our various Iraqi detention centers, they noted that at all of them, there seemed to be a single playbook – the real playbook – of practices focusing on the sexual and religious humiliation of those detainees deemed “high value,” i.e. most likely to yield Actionable Intel.

But we had better be prepared for the consequences. Someone, somewhere, is going to try us, quite seriously, for war crimes. And somewhere else, someone is going to commit war crimes against our soldiers because we fail to recognize their own combatants as POWs. And it won’t be pretty.