The opinion, reached in recent months, establishes an important exception to public assertions by the Bush administration since March 2003 that the Geneva Conventions applied comprehensively to prisoners taken in the conflict in Iraq, the officials said. They said the opinion would essentially allow the military and the C.I.A. to treat at least a small number of non-Iraqi prisoners captured in Iraq in the same way as members of Al Qaeda and the Taliban captured in Afghanistan, Pakistan or elsewhere, for whom the United States has maintained that the Geneva Conventions do not apply.
The officials outlined the opinion on Monday in response to a report in The Washington Post over the weekend that the Central Intelligence Agency had secretly transferred a dozen non-Iraqi prisoners out of Iraq in the past 18 months, despite a provision in the conventions that bars civilians protected under the accords from being deported from occupied territories.
Funny, I would have thought their previous "legal opinion" that Bush is king of the world and can ignore any law he wants would have covered this incident, like it did the Abu Ghraib tortures.
It's all in the interpretation, is it not? I wonder if the Bush administration's legal team ever sleeps, having to re-interpret laws to cover all of their bosses' illegal activities.
All the quibbling about whether the Geneva Conventions apply seems to me to be academic anyway. No one's arguing that the Conventions didn't apply to prisoners at Abu Ghraib and other Iraq prisons, but they certainly weren't adhered to there. No one's arguing that the Conventions don't apply to civilian populations, but we still hold family members hostage, break into and destroy homes, and engage in collective punishment against cities like Falluja, all in violation of the Conventions.
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