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[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by SlaveNoMore
Hamdan said Geneva applies. The President wants clarity to comply with the judiciary.

However, if the President didn't seek to comply with Hamdan, all of you would be in a uproar about how the Executive is ignoring an express direction from the judiciary.

It would be very simply to comply with Hamdan. The President doesn't want to. He wants the CIA to be able to torture people. If the President really wants clarity, he already has it. That's not what he wants. Fred Hiatt's WaPo editorial page explains:

• When Mr. Bush was asked Friday whether he wasn't in effect seeking sanction for torture, he responded with an evasion. He claimed that the Geneva Conventions' Common Article 3 is "very vague" and that his proposal would provide "clarity" for CIA professionals. In fact, the opposite is true.
  
  Common Article 3, which prohibits cruel treatment and humiliation, is an inflexible standard. The U.S. military, which lived with it comfortably for decades before the Bush administration, just reembraced it after a prolonged battle with the White House. The Army issued a thick manual this month that tells interrogators exactly what they can and cannot do in complying with the standard. The nation's most respected military leaders have said that they need and want nothing more to accomplish the mission of detaining and interrogating enemy prisoners -- and that harsher methods would be counterproductive.
  
  Mr. Bush wants to replace these clear rules with a flexible and subjective standard -- one that would legalize any method that does not "shock the conscience." What shocks the conscience? According to Mr. Bush's Justice Department, the torture techniques described above -- and at least in the past, waterboarding -- do not, "in certain circumstances." So Mr. Bush's real objection to Common Article 3 is not that it is vague. It is that it will not permit abusive practices that he isn't willing publicly to discuss or defend.

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