WTF

[walbourn]

Ashcroft spent the day playing "verbal ping-pong" with the Congress over a series of legal briefs coming out of the Justice Dept under his direction that basically say "if the President orders it, it is 'not unlawful' to torture prisoners"... completely hypothetically of course.

Here's my favorite part of his testimony:

ATTN. GEN. ASHCROFT: But the only people who are accorded the protections of the Geneva Convention are, number one, according to the convention itself, those nations that are high contracting parties to the convention. Al-Qaida is not a high-contracting party to the Geneva Convention. It repudiates the rules of war.

Now, the law against the torture applies. When the Congress enacted the torture statute, it enacted a law that said it applied everywhere outside the United States. But when the Congress defined the United States, it's not simple: It will sometimes include military bases, it will sometimes include consular offices, it will sometimes include the residences or embassy offices. And when the Congress of the United States makes these definitions, that's what I have to live by.

I'm sorry, but I thought the point was that it was always illegal to torture prisoners. There isn't a lot of room here morally. Ashcroft is basically arguing that since the prisoners are outside of the United States and not technically covered by the Geneva Convention it is OK to torture them if they happen to be on US military bases and therefore 'in' the US.

So, if between the Geneva Convention and the US Anti-Torture Law we have some group that can be "lawfully"^* tortured based on geography, perhaps someone should fix the god-damn law!

It was so nice of Ashcroft to find these loopholes and suggest the Administration order the military to exploit them.

Hypothetically of course.

^* Technically Ashcroft's people used the phrase "not unlawful". It must be nice to live in a world where you can do something illegal that is not unlawful. If only the 'law of the excluded middle' applied to lawyers.