BAD FAITH

WITH AN APPEAL the devil himself might appreciate, Assistant Secretary Secretary of  of Defense  Stephen Cambone is at the center of an effort to get around John McCain’s no torture amendment.  Even as the House gave notice of support for the McCain amendment that would limit interrogation techniques to what is listed in the Army Field Manual, in the midst of this Cambone has worked a new secret addendum of “enhanced interrogation techniques” into  . . .  the Army Field Manual.

The Army has approved a new, classified set of interrogation methods that may complicate negotiations over legislation proposed by Senator John McCain to bar cruel and inhumane treatment of detainees in American custody, military officials said Tuesday.
The techniques are included in a 10-page classified addendum to a new Army field manual that was forwarded this week to Stephen A. Cambone, the under secretary of defense for intelligence policy, for final approval, they said.
The addendum provides dozens of examples and goes into exacting detail on what procedures may or may not be used, and in what circumstances. Army interrogators have never had a set of such specific guidelines that would help teach them how to walk right up to the line between legal and illegal interrogations.

MUCH WILL BE MADE of the House bill just passed, but its support of McCain’s provisions are suggested, not binding unlike some of torture’s enhanced interrogation techniques.  The Senate wants to know where the secret prisons are and what is going on there.  Everyone is close to agreeing on what everyone agreed on before.  "Torture" is wrong.  We knew that back before Abu Ghraib.  Every time a new definition of what is not allowed or a restriction on conduct we already know is wrong is put on paper, somebody like Stephen Cambone finds a way around the latest rules.  If someone says you have to go by the book, is it any surprise Cambone would re write the book?

ABOUT STEPHEN CAMBONE Jason Vest wrote in The Nation: On Saturday, May 15--twenty-four hours after The Nation published "Implausible Denial"--The New Yorker posted on its website Seymour Hersh's latest Abu Ghraib-related investigative report. Its central revelation: The interrogations at Abu Ghraib were part of a highly classified Special Access Program (SAP) code-named Copper Green, authorized by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and ultimately overseen by Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Stephen Cambone. Originally a joint CIA-Pentagon program in Afghanistan that utilized highly trained Special Operations personnel, Copper Green eventually expanded to Iraq, Hersh reports, where Cambone decided it would begin using non-Special Operations personnel--including military intelligence officers and other military personnel--to begin questioning prisoners whose status was outside the program's original brief. The CIA objected and withdrew from the program, while Cambone apparently tasked Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, former Guantánamo Bay interrogations chief, with "Gitmo-izing" Iraq's prison system.

GOOD MEN MAY do their best, but one man acting in bad faith can negate what other good men do.  It is well and good that we have new laws against torture, but if men don't obey them where will we find ourselves?

CAMBONE WITHOUT IRONY in response to a question on intelligence in Iraq: The problem everybody is struggling with is you have a regime which is, if it is noted for one thing beyond its brutality, it is its ability to deceive, to deny, to compartment, to mislead, to misdirect. And it is through that haze, that fog, that deliberate set of misdirections and deceptions that they are trying to work. For you to have that impression is probably not surprising.

CAMBONE Undersecretary of Defense for Doublespeak testified before the Senate: To grant terrorists the rights they so cruelly reject would make a mockery of the Geneva Conventions. Nevertheless President Bush did order -- did order that detainees held at Guantanamo be treated humanely and consistent with the convention's principles and, in fact, those detainees in the war on terror are being provided with many of the privileges typically afforded to enemy prisoners of war.
The notion that this decision in some way undermined the Geneva Convention or create a poor climate is false. To the contrary, the administration made this decision with the objective of assuring that those who would claim protection under its auspices and not act in keeping with its intent did not abuse the Geneva Convention. Far from disrespect, the decision was made out of a notion of respect.

RECOMMENDED ADDITIONAL READING on Stephen Cambone
SPENCER ACKERMAN on Cambone and The Rumsfeld Power Grab. MORE FROM JASON VEST Implausible Denial [part one]
SPIN DENTIST at All Spin Zone recommends Helen Thomas.

Comments

[zencomix]

"Copper Green" ....the green on copper is tarnish or corrosion?