Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Dalla Cambogia ad Abu Ghraib

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040712&s=shapiro
Rehnquist, Cambodia & Abu Ghraib
by Bruce Shapiro
It is April of 1970. President Richard Nixon, frustrated with the Vietnam
War, orders tens of thousands of US and South Vietnamese troops to invade
neutral Cambodia. He launches his new war--and widens his bombing
campaign--without consulting an outraged Congress. Demonstrations engulf
campuses and cities. Aides to National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger quit
in protest. And at the Justice Department, an assistant attorney general
named William Rehnquist, in charge of the Office of Legal Counsel, makes a
case for the legality of Nixon's new war in a white paper, "The President
and the War Power."
It is half a lifetime from that spring to this one, and half a world from
Cambodia to Iraq. The historical chasm abruptly collapsed, though, with the
release of the memo on torture written for the White House in August 2002 by
Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee, Rehnquist's latter-day successor at
the Office of Legal Counsel. What do Nixon and Cambodia have to do with the
beatings and rapes at Abu Ghraib? Ask Bybee, because it is his memo that
makes the comparison with Cambodia and Rehnquist, a comparison that lays
open the deeper motivations, goals and implications of the Bush
Administration's interrogation policy.
The Bybee memo attempts to erect a legal scaffolding for physical and
psychological coercion of prisoners in the War on Terror. Coming from the
Office of Legal Counsel, it holds the authority of a policy directive. The
memo proposes so finessed and technical a reading of antibrutality laws that
all manner of "cruel, inhuman or degrading" interrogation
techniques--including beatings and sexual violations like those in Abu
Ghraib--simply get reclassified as Not Torture. The memo's language so
offends common sensibility that within a few days of its release, White
House officials were disavowing its conclusions and selectively
declassifying documents allegedly showing the President's commitment to
humane treatment of prisoners.
(How exculpatory is the Bush Administration's self-serving document dump?
Not a single page is concerned with prisoners in Iraq. Not one sentence
refers to the CIA, which according to Seymour Hersh first employed coercive
interrogation in Afghanistan with the acquiescence of Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld. Indeed, the most substantial and authoritative Pentagon
document declassified by the White House, the April 4, 2003, "Working Group
Report on Detainee Interrogations in the Global War on Terrorism,"
explicitly limits its scope to "DOD personnel in DOD interrogation
facilities." Contract interrogators and CIA operatives are nowhere covered;
neither are prisoners held under the authority of foreign governments,
paramilitary allies or US intelligence agencies.)
Yet even while putting up a smokescreen of concern for humanitarian
treatment of prisoners, the Administration made no attempt to distance
itself from Bybee's most crucial theme: unreviewable presidential war
powers. Anti-torture laws, the memo argues, simply do not apply to
"detentions and interrogations of enemy combatants pursuant to [Bush's]
Commander-in-Chief authority." All the documents released by the White House
reflect this same obsession with presidential war powers-and in many cases,
incorporate Bybee's precise language.
It is in defense of his view of the Commander in Chief's legal impunity that
Bybee invokes the Cambodia precedent, citing Rehnquist's 1970 white paper as
his principal authority. Rehnquist spelled out his arguments both in that
memo and in an article later that year for the New York University Law
Review.
One glance at the Rehnquist documents and it is easy to see why his 1970
reasoning resonates throughout the Bush Administration's 2002 and 2003
memorandums. Just as Bybee finds that torture isn't torture, Rehnquist
argued that the invasion of Cambodia wasn't really an invasion: "By crossing
the Cambodian border to attack sanctuaries used by the the enemy, the United
States has in no sense gone to war with Cambodia." The Bybee memo offers
officials accused of torture the "necessity" defense; in 1970, Rehnquist
argued that pursuing Vietcong troops into previously neutral territory was
"necessary to assure [American troops'] safety in the field."
In particular, Rehnquist offered the Nixon White House a bold vision of the
Commander in Chief's authority at its most expansive and unreviewable: The
President's war power, he wrote acerbically, must amount to "something
greater than a seat of honor in the reviewing stand." Cambodia--where the
devastation of the war and the Nixon Administration's carpet-bombing
following the invasion would prepare the way for the Khmer Rouge
holocaust--amounted to "the sort of tactical decision traditionally confided
to the commander in chief."
For Rehnquist, the invasion of Cambodia in May of 1970 was a dual watershed.
On the one hand, it marked the greatest assertion of expansive presidential
warmaking power, crystallized in the white paper cited by Bybee. At the same
time, protests against the Cambodian invasion led Nixon to centralize the
gathering of domestic political intelligence directly in the White House;
Rehnquist supported this domestic expansion of executive-branch authority,
arguing in court for no-knock entry, preventive detention, wiretaps and
other ancestors of today's Patriot Act.
The authority of Nixon and his successors was soon curtailed--at least on
paper--by reform-minded legislation: the War Powers Act, the Freedom of
Information Act, CIA reform, the War Crimes Act and a host of other
statutes. And ever since the invasion of Cambodia, a parade of conservative
policy-makers--among them Rehnquist, Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick
Cheney--have repeatedly sought to regain the expansive presidential power
asserted in Rehnquist's memo.
This is what is really at stake in the torture scandal. The circle of
history has come around: The Bush Administration's theory of unconstrained
war powers connects straight back to its Nixonian origins. Sometime in the
coming few days, William Rehnquist will be among the Supreme Court Justices
ruling on the Guantánamo Bay detentions and the designation of American
citizens as enemy combatants. However he and the Court rule, his career-long
crusades, rooted in the Nixon presidency, on behalf of gloves-off policing
practices and executive-branch warmaking prerogatives now come together in a
Baghdad prison. The Bush Administration's memos not only facilitate torture
as public policy. Like the Nixon Administration in 1970, they articulate a
philosophy of the presidency best described as authoritarian. That is the
hidden message of Abu Ghraib.

 neutral Cambodia.
Per precisione ricordo che gia' da anni truppe nord-viet e guerriglieri 
vietcong usavano tranquillamente il territorio della neutrale Cambogia e 
dell'altrettanto neutrale Laos.
Pangloss
-- 
"Too Old to Rock'n'Roll, Too Young to Die"
Ian Anderson