nbcrusader said:
So, we can all breath easy now. Now we are all clear, someone else wrote the memo. So much for Sharky's statement.
No I didn't. Here you go:
The attacks by Al Qaeda on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, these lawyers said, had plunged the country into a new kind of war. It was a conflict against a vast, outlaw, international enemy in which the rules of war, international treaties and even the Geneva Conventions did not apply. These positions were laid out in secret legal opinions drafted by lawyers from the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, and then endorsed by the Department of Defense and ultimately by White House counsel Alberto Gonzales, according to copies of the opinions and other internal legal memos obtained by NEWSWEEK.
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WASHINGTON (Tues., May 18) – U. S. Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) continued to press for congressional oversight Tuesday on the treatment of U.S. prisoners in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. In a letter to White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales, Leahy sought a copy of a memorandum in which Gonzales discussed the applications of the Geneva Conventions in the war against terrorism. The content of the memo has been the subject of several media reports in recent days. Leahy, the ranking Democratic member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has pursued oversight inquiries to DOD, the White House, DOJ and the CIA since last year on prisoner abuse/torture policy issues, and he has pushed for greater oversight by Senate committees since the abuses of Iraqi prisoners emerged in recent weeks. In a letter sent to Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), the panel’s chairman, shortly after the abuses were reported, Leahy asked that the committee convene a hearing. The text of both letters follows.
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In a January 25, 2002, memo, White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales advised the President of "the threat of domestic criminal prosecution under the War Crimes Act," a federal statute. He advised Bush to invent a legal technicality--declaring detainees in the "war on terror" to be outside the Geneva Conventions--which, he said, "substantially reduces" the chance of prosecution. Gonzales went further, telling the President that the war on terrorism "renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners"; he pooh-poohed concerns that abandoning the Geneva standards might endanger US troops.
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The Bush administration yesterday released a delayed report on U.S. efforts to promote human rights, one day after a memo by White House counsel Alberto R. Gonzales emerged that had dismissed some of the provisions of the Geneva Conventions as "quaint."
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Within months of the Sept. 11 attacks, White House counsel Alberto Gonzales reportedly wrote President Bush a memo about the terrorism fight and prisoners' rights under the Geneva Conventions.
"In my judgment, this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions," Gonzales wrote, according to the report in Newsweek magazine. Secretary of State Colin Powell "hit the roof" when he read the memo, according to the account.
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