Revisiting Guantanamo: Congress Failed To Enforce Geneva

Members of Congress have illegally failed to enforce Geneva. The Guantanamo abuses were illegally compared by Congress without proper Article III review.

Congress has no power in 2006 to prevent the Judicial branch from reviewing the Member of Congress failure to stop Geneva violations, or examine which standards, other than the required Geneva requirements, Congress did or did not enforce.

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There's a problem with the 2002 Timelines in Guantanamo. The 170th Military Police Company, under 6th Group knew about the violations, and the Joint Staff was alerted. Once the Attorney General knew that there had been violations of Statute that would have triggered a Title 28 report to Congress.

The original Congressional reviews of the Guantanamo-Abu Ghraib abuses did not compare the conduct to Geneva. Rather, the public and Congress compared the misconduct to the incorrect US assertion of the law.

The DoJ memoranda show the US legal community was not following Geneva. By using the incorrect standard, the Congressional reviews did not credibly assess the war crimes implications.

Congress, despite this invalid review, is in no legal position to say the court may or may not review the Member of Congress failure to review the issues; nor may Congress lawfully prevent any and all Article III judicial reviews of alleged member of Congress complicity.

It makes no difference what Congress did or did not agree or understand after Guantanamo. The proper forum to review the abuses was not within Congress, but in a war crimes tribunal.

Despite Hamdan, Rasul, Abu Ghraib, the Afghanistan Box car incidents, the US continued to engage in abuses in CIA detention centers in Eastern Europe. Members of Congress are individually reckless for permitting this illegal abuse from continuing well after the first abuses were documented shortly after 2001.

These are not isolated incidents, but recurring patterns of misconduct which Congress well knew about, but failed to investigate or end relative to the Geneva conventions. The known Congressional failure to enforce Geneva dates back to 2001 when the AUMF was passed; the first documented message that the Joint Staff and Members of Congress knew about, and should have investigated, but did not, occurred within a matter of weeks, not years.