In another article, Phaedrus kicked off a compilation of Bush’s high crimes and misdemeanors. Lemme give you a slam dunk - WAR CRIMES. BushTortureWaPo

In what appears to be just one more Bush lawyer working overtime to convince us that the Geneva Conventions do not apply to captives in the military actions in Iraq and Afghanistan, State Department Legal Adviser John Bellinger has declared:

[The Conventions] do not apply to every situation. They in fact apply to conflicts between states. So therefore the Geneva Conventions do not give you the answers about who can be held in a conflict with a non-state actor. They do not tell you how long you can hold someone in a conflict with a non-state actor. They do not tell you what countries to return people to. In a normal conflict where one is fighting one or maybe two countries, at the end of the conflict you return the combatants to those countries. In fighting al-Qaida we've found that we have detained individuals from more than two dozen countries around the world. The Geneva Conventions do not provide answers to those questions so they don't provide sufficient guidance to countries as to what law to apply.

We’ve heard this before - it’s one of BAA Boy’s mantras - but Bellinger takes the argument one step further by calling for “clarification“:

The United States is firmly committed to the law that applies. We're also committed to working with other countries around the world to develop new legal norms in cases where existing law does not give one the answers. But what we do think is problematic is to simply suggest that the Geneva Conventions provide all of the answers in fighting international terrorism, and that countries simply need to follow the Geneva Conventions and that is the end of the matter.

Bellinger’s attempt to convince us that we need a new international torture protocol - a new protocol to deal with things not specifically covered in the prior Conventions or Protocols, like waterboarding, like the “harsh interrogation techniques“ I‘ve documented in other articles - is but a transparent attempt to undermine any potential prosecution of Bush, Cheney and their minions for grave violations of existing Geneva Conventions.

If Bellinger can “clarify” the Protocols to deem waterboarding as torture, Mukasey can be given the green light to declare waterboarding IS torture after all. It would validate the torture policy that was worked out when Bellinger was in the White House. It would validate Bush’s other legal apologists for torture, notably, Haynes, Bradbury, Yoo, Goldsmith, Gonzales and Addington.

If Bellinger fails, all these dudes are vulnerable to prosecution and, if there is one lesson in this, it is that there is an almost unending availability of shyster Republican lawyers willing to build sandcastle analyses that enable the Bush administration to argue that what it has done, what it is doing, is perfectly legal.

Perfectly legal?  Doesn’t wash with me or with the Canadian courts:

Last Thursday, the Federal Court of Canada struck down a refugee agreement between Canada and the US, noting that the US does not meet international refugee protection requirements or respect international conventions against torture. Justice Michael Phelan essentially nullified the 2004 Safe Third Country Agreement, noting that the US has not complied with the Refugee Convention or the UN Convention Against Torture which violates Canada's Charter of Rights.

Whaddayou think?

http://www.nationalpost.com/news/story.html?