White House, Congress seek to legalize kangaroo courts, torture

At Senate and House committee hearings this week, Justice Department and Pentagon officials urged Congress to pass legislation that simply ratifies the military tribunals as they were established under an executive order issued by Bush four years ago. At the same time, leading senators held talks at the White House on the procedures to be employed at the tribunals, which would include hearing evidence obtained from “coercive interrogation,” a euphemism for torture.

As in all its efforts in the so-called war on terror, the Bush administration says one thing and does the opposite. Officially, the White House has publicly submitted to the authority of the Supreme Court, accepting the 5-3 decision in Hamdan.

The most publicized gesture in this direction came in a memorandum sent out by Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England to all US military commands on July 7, and released to the media on July 11. The memo reports the high court’s ruling that “that Common Article 3 to the Geneva Conventions of 1949 applies as a matter of law to the conflict with Al-Qaeda” and that the “military commission procedures” ordered by Bush were not consistent with that article.

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http://wsws.org/articles/2006/jul2006/guan-j14.shtml