“The Bush Administration has decided to grant all
detainees at the Guantanamo Bay detention centre protections offered by the
Geneva Convention,” our ABC breathlessly headlined on tonight’s News.

Guantanamo
Detainees Entitled To Geneva rights, Says US

Whilst “auntie” continues to
confirm its superficial role as a message board for government spinmeisters,
real journalists elsewhere were reporting the truth of this latest episode of
bushit “smoke & mirrors” …….

“Just hours after the White House announcement,
Administration officials came before the Senate Judiciary Committee and began
to try to weasel their way out from under the letter and spirit of last month's
Supreme Court ruling that prompted the stunning change in policy.

Not only that, but federal lawyers told Congress that the
White House's about-face on the rights of the detainees isn't really an
about-face at all but simply a confirmation of the legal position the Justices
announced in June when they declared that the Administration's planned military
commissions for the Guantanamo Bay detainees violated domestic law and the
Conventions themselves.

"The memo that went out, it doesn't indicate a shift in
policy," Daniel Dell'Orto, principal deputy counsel at the Department of
Defense, told Committee members. "It just announces the decision of the
court." This whopper of a statement came around the same time that
Dell'Orto told the Senate, presumably with a straight face, that the current
treatment of detainees at Gitmo and elsewhere already complied with Article 3 of the Conventions. That would be odd
since it has been the policy of the Administration, since 2002, to consider
suspected terrorists to be beyond the reach of the Conventions' provisions.
That failed and now obsolete policy is what led us to Abu Ghraib, for example,
and many of the other cases of detainee abuse and torture that have inflamed
passions all over the world.

The onus now falls upon Congress to see through this spin
and reject the Administration's stubborn insistence that it's trial plans for
the detainees are legitimate and legal. They are not. The Supreme Court has
said so. Unless the other two branches agree upon a series of procedures for
the detainees that are designed not just to be "recognized as
indispensible by civilized people," as the Conventions require, but also
to comport with some sort of constitutional due process, we all will be back
here in a few years after another Administration setback at the
Supreme Court.”

After
The Turnabout, The Spin