Finding the 'Technical' Loopholes

A young woman, an aspiring teacher, wrote to me last night. She’ll be teaching a high school class this summer and will be asking her students to act as the U.S. Attorney General (AG), in his role within the National Security Council (NSC). She asked for ideas to help the students understand the international consequences of that role.

The only required sub-group of the NSC that the attorney general must be part of is the Committee on Transnational Threats. The committee has a plethora of duties, but among them is this to: “develop strategies to enable the United States Government to respond to transnational threats.”

Let’s see what Alberto Gonzales, the newest AG charged with interpreting the law – both domestic and international - for the Executive Branch, can contribute here.

In 2002, Gonzales wrote a memo to the President in which he stated that the president “has the constitutional authority” to determine that “GPW [Geneva Convention III Treatment of Prisoners of War] does not apply to al Qaeda or the Taliban.” He also pointed out the pros and cons of choosing not to follow the Geneva Convention rules.

On the plus side, was “preserv[ing] flexibility.” Look how flexible we all could be if we didn’t need to follow the law. We might even chose to drive on the wrong side of the highway during rush hour to save a bit of time.

Another plus, one of my favorites, was that if we didn’t look at the detainees as prisoners of war and treated them as inhumanely as we choose, we couldn’t be charged with war crimes, because we weren’t abusing POWs, just detainees – kind of like the “if I don’t recognize it, it doesn’t exist” mentality. I wonder if that means that Kim Jong-il can choose to look at North Korea’s nuclear arsenal as self-defense weapons, not nukes.

On the negative side, Gonzales suggested that if we didn’t look at detainees as POWs, we might “encourage other countries to look for ‘technical’ loopholes… to conclude… they are not bound” by the Convention either. And another negative was that we might receive “widespread condemnation by our allies.”

Yet, Gonzales concluded by saying he felt that the rules of POW treatment didn’t apply… in essence, ensuring alienation from other countries whose perceptions of us apparently didn’t matter too much.

So, this week, as Washington begins to review the Patriot Act, it’s hard to help but wonder if Gonzales and company will choose to alienate those opposed to sections of the Act and if “’technical’ loopholes” will become a way to ensure that our civil liberties will continue to be assaulted.

Maybe the teacher-to-be will look at these issues with her students. Maybe they will become more informed – and impassioned to help America make progress as a humanitarian world player that respects others.

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Written in conjunction with Jennifer Hicks.