Petraeus endorses Geneva Conventions, closing Gitmo

by: Carnacki

Tue May 26, 2009 at 13:11:00 PM EDT

In an appearance on Radio Free Europe Sunday, the man hailed by conservatives as the preeminent military figure of his generation left little room for doubt about where he stands on some of Obama's most contentious policies.

"I think, on balance, that those moves help [us]," said the chief of U.S. Central Command. "In fact, I have long been on record as having testified and also in helping write doctrine for interrogation techniques that are completely in line with the Geneva Convention. And as a division commander in Iraq in the early days, we put out guidance very early on to make sure that our soldiers, in fact, knew that we needed to stay within those guidelines.

"With respect to Guantanamo," Petraeus added, "I think that the closure in a responsible manner, obviously one that is certainly being worked out now by the Department of Justice -- I talked to the Attorney General the other day [and] they have a very intensive effort ongoing to determine, indeed, what to do with the detainees who are left, how to deal with them in a legal way, and if continued incarceration is necessary -- again, how to take that forward. But doing that in a responsible manner, I think, sends an important message to the world, as does the commitment of the United States to observe the Geneva Convention when it comes to the treatment of detainees."

But torture and waterboarding - but I repeat myself - are important to national security. Dick Cheney and his spawn were on my TV telling me so.

I thought it was only the far left bloggers opposed to torture and for closing Gitmo. Do you know what this must mean? Petraeus must be one of those far left bloggers!

Update

Andrew Sullivan highlights this section of Dick Cheney's torture speech last week and compares it to the Senate Armed Services Committee report:

Perhaps the most remarkable passage in (Cheney's) speech to AEI last week was the following:

In public discussion of these matters, there has been a strange and sometimes willful attempt to conflate what happened at Abu Ghraib prison with the top secret program of enhanced interrogations. At Abu Ghraib, a few sadistic prison guards abused inmates in violation of American law, military regulations, and simple decency. For the harm they did, to Iraqi prisoners and to America's cause, they deserved and received Army justice. And it takes a deeply unfair cast of mind to equate the disgraces of Abu Ghraib with the lawful, skillful, and entirely honorable work of CIA personnel trained to deal with a few malevolent men.

There are two options in trying to understand this passage: a) It reveals a profound and disturbing level of denial about his own record; or b) It is one of the Biggest of Big Lies ever told by a vice-president of the United States. Perhaps the easiest way to show this is to cite the final and definitive "Conclusion 19" of the Senate Armed Services Committee Report:

The abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib in late 2003 was not simply the result of a few soldiers acting on their own. Interrogation techniques such as stripping detainees of their clothes, placing them in stress positions, and using military working dogs to intimidate them appeared in Iraq only after they had been approved for use in Afghanistan and at GTMO. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's December 2, 2002 authorization of aggressive interrogation techniques and subsequent interrogation policies and plans approved by senior military and civilian officials conveyed the message that physical pressures and degradation were appropriate treatment for detainees in U.S. military custody. What followed was an erosion in standards dictating that detainees be treated humanely.

There is no factual dispute as to the real origin of what Cheney calls the "disgraces" of Abu Ghraib: Dick Cheney via Don Rumsfeld.

Cheney wants to scape goat the low ranking soldiers like Lynddie England to take the fall for his actions.