This is a very odd article considering the interviewee was lucky not to be courtmartialed for ordering a British general to attack a Russian contingent and continually called for a armored invasion of Serbia via Romania after being "asked" by the Clinton Administration to keep his comments to himself.

Much like an interview conducted after the Civil War with Gen McClellan discussing the failures of Gen Grant in not waiting until he had a huge numerical superiority before moving into Virginia. Or how the Johnson Administration handled the Reconstruction. Newsweek must have a very short institutional memory.

The fact that Gen Clark refers to an ebb in Russian/American relations and doesn't mention that he had a more than large hand in that setback. The Russians had been promised, unwisely, that they would have an independent command in the north and would not report to the NATO chain of command which through ignorance or spite Gen Clark refused to acknowledge. And the fact that his two immediate superiors thought him unfit to be president, including Gen Shelton.

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2003/11/17/031117fa_fact

Plus the confusion arose in that Gen Clark consulted with Javier Solana and not Gen Shelton. It also should be noted that the French also refused to obey Gen Clark's orders as illegitimate.

"No wonder Pat intensely dislikes him?" Reading tea leaves or goats livers again must suffice for Gen Clark simply being wrong as waterboarding as described in the three documented cases, though obviously disagreeable does not meet the basic requirement of causing of the one treaty the US signed as "extreme pain". Also that Clark is wrong when he claims that this and the other imaginary agreements are binding on the US because the 6th Amendment supercedes any treaty that is contradictory to those rights. And we can surmise from the approval the current Speaker of the House gave that it must have been effective.

The full text of his comment refers to the Revolutionary War of which he seems so unaware that Washington's edicts concerning the Hessians was an attempt, and a failed one at that, to keep the Continentals and the militias from killing or torturing the mercenaries upon capture or soon after. And if waterboarding in any form is torture then why didn't Clark eliminate its use from his own TO because it was used regularly on Army personnel, and other servicemen not under his command, as part of their SERE training?

I actually might have a bit more sympathy to this view if I didn't suspect that even if there weren't any charges those opposed to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan wouldn't be just as diligent in finding some other "immoral" conduct that would allow that warm glow of self-righteousness to continue. There is a long and glorious tradition in the US of opposition to war being founded on the most ludicrous of charges. Such as using telescopic gunsights during the Civil War, or pump-action shotguns by the Marines in the First World War or napalm in the Second. Some simply cannot abide by war by popular vote because they know deep down that if only the citizens were omniscent and moral then they would never have voted for the war unless they had been lied to or tricked by immoral leadership.

No, not Clark's and thank you as your explanation is much easier to understand then the one I have been flogging for months. The problem that I see is that Article 6 and the 6th Amendment are on a contradictory path and as of yet there has been no definitive SCOTUS decision to clear the confusion. I sense that the original Article was referring to the laws and treaties between nations, such as trade agreements, articles of war, purchase of land and the supremacy of the federal government in these areas. But I also don't think that the writers ever suspected that the Article would be used to redefine the relation between citizens and the federal government. In other words the idea that any treaties signed, especially those that have not been ratified, are binding on the citizens simply because of Article 6.

You should have done a bit more work on that idea as Almagor, an Israeli victims group, is using the Spanish courts to pressure the Spanish magistrates to drop any case against Israel for the Lebanaese invasion, Israeli attacks into Gaza and the West Bank as well as the assasination of a Hamas leader in Syria a few years ago. Prominently mentioned in the suit is Javier Solana, politicians of both parties and the Spanish equivalent of the JCS. Almagor is by no stretch of the imagination interested in any actual trial of Spanish officials during the NATO bombing of Serbia but rather for the Spanish to drop the pretension of being impartial.

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1239710862408&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull