Bushcoland - the theater of the absurd, the bizarre and the downright unbelievable

yep, robert parry's no longer behind the news power curve...

George W. Bush's latest mind-bending rationalizations about torturing detainees from the Iraq War and the War on Terror might have left Kafka and Orwell scratching their heads. Bush's lawyers are now arguing that while a new law may bar cruel and inhuman treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, the detainees have no legal standing in U.S. courts to contest the abuse -- and thus there is no way they can stop it. Under these legal theories, the only person who can enforce this law is President Bush -- and he's one of the key people responsible for the illegal treatment in the first place.

the inmates are running the asylum...

Bush, of course, insists that the United States does not torture despite extensive evidence that detainees in the Iraq War and the War on Terror have been subjected to simulated drowning by “water-boarding,” beatings to death, suffocations, coffin-like confinements, painful stress positions, naked exposure to heat and cold, anal rape, sleep deprivation, dog bites, and psychological ploys involving sexual and religious humiliation.

But Bush says none of this amounts to torture, even as his protection of abusive practices now ventures beyond word games into mind-bending legal rationalizations.

Bush’s lawyers went into federal court in Washington on March 2 and argued that a new law that specifically prohibits cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of detainees – known as the McCain Amendment after its sponsor, Sen. John McCain – can’t be enforced at Guantanamo Bay because another clause of the law grants these prisoners only limited access to U.S. courts.

In other words, the Bush administration is contending that the McCain Amendment might make it illegal to abuse the Guantanamo prisoners, but that the inmates have no legal recourse to enforce the law by going to court and getting an order for the abuses to end.

mommy, mommy, make the bad man stop...

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