Rebuttal by Powell of Justification for Torture
Colin L. Powell | US Department of State | January 26, 2002
Text (pdf)
This memo was sent by Secretary of State Colin Powell in response to a briefing paper prepared by the legal counsel to the president. The secretary of state is asking the president to reconsider his judgment that detainees held in the “war on terrorism” cannot be afforded Prisoner of War (POW) status under the Geneva Convention. Calling the DOJ’s document “inaccurate,” Powell’s response casts the decision to strip detainees of Geneva protections in an ominous light, accurately predicting the response domestically, internationally and within Iraq itself. “The United States has never determined that the GPW did not apply to an armed conflict in which its forces have been engaged,” the secretary wrote, and “while no-one [sic] anticipated the precise situation that we face, the GPW was intended to cover all types of armed conflict.” [The memo is temporarily unavailable; you can download a copy off-site.] View file [0.0kb]
“I appreciate the opportunity to comment on the draft memorandum. I am concerned that the draft does not squarely present to the President the options that are available to him. Nor does it identify the significant pros and cons of each option.”
|
Opening this file
PDF: Increasingly becoming the standard for viewing formatted text documents. Download Adobe Acrobat Reader to read these files.
|
This website is a tribute to Why War?, one of the nation's first and most innovative post-9/11 student antiwar organizations. Born on October 22, 2001 at Swarthmore College, we were a handful of freshmen and sophmores who vocally opposed the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere. And now, seven years later, we are retiring this website as we focus our efforts on new directions. We hope that it continues to serve future activists and we remain confident that humanity is on the verge birthing a better world.
|