Exactly.
[...]
A senior administration official, authorized to speak with reporters about the legal issues behind the administration's strategy yesterday on the condition that he not be named, said the CIA interrogations at issue are in "the gray area on the margins -- that ill-defined boundary -- of Common Article 3." He was referring to a Geneva Conventions provision that bars cruel, humiliating and degrading treatment, as well as "outrages upon personal dignity."
There are ironies in the positions of each side in the current dispute. The administration says its intent is to define the explicit meaning of Common Article 3 so that CIA officers know exactly what they can do. But the senior official who addressed the legal issue yesterday said the standard the administration prefers is "context-sensitive," a phrase that suggests an endlessly shifting application of the rules.
The reason is that the administration's language would in effect ban only those interrogation techniques that "shock the conscience." That phrase, drawn from a judicial interpretation of the U.S. Constitution, is a "flexible" standard, the official said. Others have said that standard would allow interrogators to weigh how urgently they felt they needed to extract information against the harshness of their techniques, instead of following rigid guidelines.
The official did not try to explain how embracing such an inherently flexible standard would actually create clarity, the watchword of the administration's public campaign for its version of the bill.
[...]
They should leave the GC (and US pre-2001 law) alone and follow its provisions in this area. IMHO.
Cheers,
Scott.
