'NUREMBERG DOWN THE DRAIN'

The Bronx, NY

Jonathan Schell, with his usual perspicacity, analyzes the latest disclosures on the games George W. Bush's lawyers play with the law ["Looking Tough," Nov. 15]. One point, however, requires comment: Their rewriting of international law is not limited to the Geneva Conventions. As Dean Koh of Yale Law School and Professor Stephen Gillers of NYU pointed out at a program called "Torture: Where Were the Lawyers?" at the City Bar Association, the most shocking aspect of those torture-sanctioning memos from the Justice Department was what they didn't say. Not a word about the prohibition of torture in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the Torture Convention. Nuremberg down the drain. General Pinochet, who justified each of his repressive policies with a presidential decree, could not have done better than the lawyers in the Office of Legal Counsel of the Department of Justice.

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