The Fight Over Presidential Power

Michael Isikoff and Stuart Taylor Jr. of Newsweek have an interesting article about the fight within the Bush administration between hardliners and others regarding the legality of the treatement of captured terrorists as well as thier detention status. As the authors write:

After seeing a Justice Department memo arguing that Qaeda and Taliban prisoners did not even deserve basic protections under the Geneva Conventions, they warned that the administration was inviting an enormous backlash, both from U.S. courts and foreign allies. It would also, they feared, jeopardize President George W. Bush's plans to try such prisoners in specially created military courts. "Even those terrorists captured in Afghanistan ... are entitled to the fundamental humane treatment standards of ... the Geneva Conventions," William Howard Taft IV, the State Department legal counselor and Bowker's boss, wrote in a Jan. 23, 2002, memo obtained by NEWSWEEK. In particular, Taft argued, the United States has always followed one provision of the Geneva Conventions—known as Common Article 3—which "provides the minimal standards" of treatment that even "terrorists captured in Afghanistan" deserve. But the complaints went unheeded. The hard-liners forcefully argued that in wartime, the president had virtually unlimited powers to defend the nation. They may come to wish they'd listened a little more closely to the warnings. In a ruling late last month, the Supreme Court came down squarely on the side of the dissenters.

Click here to read the full article.

--Tom Hayes