cCain vows to add torture ban to all major Senate legislation

McCain to add torture ban to all major Senate legislation

I'm not a big McCain fan, but he deserves a lot of credit for this. State sanctioned torture is about as anti-American as it gets.


McCain vows to add torture ban to all major Senate legislation

John Hendren
Los Angeles Times
Nov. 5, 2005 12:00 AM

WASHINGTON - Girding for a potential fight with the Bush administration, supporters of a ban on torturing prisoners of war by U.S. interrogators threatened Friday to include the prohibition in nearly every bill the Senate considers until it becomes law.

The no-torture wording, which proponents say is supported by majorities in both houses of Congress, was included last month in the Senate's version of a defense spending bill. The measure's final form is being negotiated with the House, and the White House is pushing for either a rewording or deletion of the torture ban.

On Friday, at the urging of Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz, the Senate by a voice vote added the ban to a related defense bill as a backup.

Speaking from the Senate floor, McCain said, "If necessary - and I sincerely hope it is not - I and the co-sponsors of this amendment will seek to add it to every piece of important legislation voted on in the Senate until the will of a substantial bipartisan majority in both houses of Congress prevails. Let no one doubt our determination."

The ban would establish the Army Field Manual as the guiding authority in interrogations and prohibit "cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment" of prisoners.

The Bush administration has sought to exempt the CIA from the ban.

McCain's stature in the fight is enhanced because he was tortured while he was a prisoner during the Vietnam War. When the Senate voted to include the ban in the defense spending bill last month, it was approved 90-9.

The House's version of the spending bill does not contain the torture ban. But Rep. John Murtha of Pennsylvania, the ranking Democrat on the House Defense Appropriations subcommittee, earlier this week urged his colleagues to accept the Senate provision.

The provision would reverse the Bush administration's contention that conditions placed on the treatment of prisoners of war in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and other international treaties signed by the United States do not apply to foreigners held overseas.

The prisoners "can, apparently, be treated inhumanely," McCain said. "This means that America is the only country in the world that asserts a legal right to engage in cruel and inhumane treatment."

Bush initially threatened to veto the "must-pass" spending bill for the Pentagon if it contained the Senate provision. Later, he sought simply to exempt the CIA from the ban. McCain called that proposal "totally unacceptable."



Opponents of the McCain language contend that setting no-torture ground rules would signal to prisoners that they have little to fear during interrogations, discouraging them from providing information.

Pentagon spokesman Larry DiRita had said Thursday that prisoners captured during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq "know what we do by virtue of interrogation manuals and procedures, And they are trained to resist."

"So there's a perception that the kind of rigidity that comes with these kinds of amendments could restrict the president's flexibility in the global war on terror," DiRita said. "And anything that restricts our ability to engage this highly agile adversary is not desirable."

 

Star Tribune

U.S. must dismantle its secret CIA gulag

November 4, 2005


Not many months ago, Amnesty International and Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., got in hot water for respectively calling Guantánamo Bay prison "the gulag of our times" and comparing America's treatment of terror-war detainees to the kind of treatment one would expect from the Soviet gulag, Pol Pot, Nazis and others. Durbin apologized.

Now comes a story by the Washington Post's Dana Priest describing a string of secret CIA prisons scattered around the world, including one at an old Soviet facility in Eastern Europe. These are prisons that are known only to a handful of officials, facilities where inmates are kept, potentially until they die, in dark, sometimes underground cells. The prisoners have no contact with anyone except jailers, are afforded no legal rights and are subjected to "enhanced" interrogation techniques that include almost drowning them. That is a gulag, albeit a miniature one.

This string of prisons is where the most important terrorist suspects are kept. Those with less potential intelligence value are "renditioned" to other countries for interrogation, including some nations that are known by the State Department to practice torture.

All this has left many professionals at the CIA, Priest reports, distressed about the legality, morality and benefits of the operation. As many experts and Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., a former POW, have said, this sort of treatment does not yield good intelligence. It is also a poor reflection on the United States, a horrible example that enables other countries to use similar techniques.

Incredibly, the Bush administration wants the inhuman treatment to continue. McCain has sponsored legislation banning the "cruel, inhuman and degrading" treatment of prisoners by the U.S. military and its intelligence agencies. In early October, the Senate passed the measure by a vote of 90-9. It now awaits action by a conference committee. President Bush has threatened to veto the measure if it contains the McCain language, while Vice President Dick Cheney has been lobbying hard to get the CIA exempted. At the same time, Cheney's new chief of staff, David Addington, is pushing the Pentagon to avoid invoking the Geneva Conventions in a new code that top military leaders want to promulgate for the armed forces.

In effect, Cheney is pushing both the military and the CIA to do things that many professionals in both organizations properly oppose because they are immoral, illegal and ineffective. The secret CIA prisons are located overseas precisely because they would be illegal in the United States.

Just how far is this nation willing to follow Cheney's ghastly way in the war on terror? He and those around him were the principal architects of the war in Iraq, and they also are at the center of prisoner abuse. And the vice president apparently regrets nothing. When his chief of staff, Lewis Libby, was indicted, Cheney quickly elevated Addington to take Libby's place. Addington was behind early White House efforts to justify torture.

Enough is enough. Congress must pass the McCain prisoner treatment legislation and then prevail in a veto showdown if it comes to that. The American gulag must be dismantled. This nation is better than the road Cheney has pushed it down. Americans know that, and the world needs to know it too.

http://www.startribune.com/dynamic/mobile_story.php?story=5707366

 

Cheney and the "Tormenters"

People often ask me at public events if I think it is "all right" to torture prisoners if that is necessary in order to obtain information needed to prosecute the "Global War on Terror." (GWOT)

I routinely tell them that it is NOT "all right" to torture people for any reason. The assembly expects that result from the question and they also expect that I will then give them the standard lecture which holds (correctly) that the tortured will tell you anything that they think you want to hear in order to get you to stop what you are doing. Therefore, information obtained through torture is logically suspect and worthless. Intelligence interrogators are supposed to be skilled at their trade. Their trade is about applied psychology, not about beating confessions out of people.

The audience is usually a little more surprised to have me tell them that "torture" is a dishonorable and immoral thing to do and that a decent person, especially a decent soldier, will have nothing to do with such things and will not allow it to happen around him or her. (At this point I can expect to hear from someone whose PTSD induced fantasy life will have encouraged a great story)

With the conversation having progressed to this point, a look of dramatic, and cynical world-weariness comes over some members of the audience and someone (often a woman) asks me what I would do if the "authorities" had captured "Fulaan Abu Shuismuh" (so and so, the father of what's his name) and this creep has the secret information needed to prevent a terrorist outrage, and won't talk. "Isn't it right to do whatever it takes....." That is the question that is always asked, often with a kind of dreamy, far off look in the eyes. I have gotten tired of this Sado-Masochistic day-dreaming, so, in response I ask them how far they would go in "whatever it takes?"

"All the way," is what these usually liberal, often academic, middle class Americans normally say. "OK," says I. "Let's say he is really obdurate and the clock is ticking on said 'terrorist outrage,' so we bring him in here and you and you will hold him down while I take his fingers and toes off one at a time with garden shears until he talks? Are you "in" for that?" Shocked silence follows. "Ah, I get it," says I. " You mean that it would be 'all right' for people like me to do these things." At that point it can be seen from the faces that this is the case.

"Ah," says I as a "follow up," "then how far are you willing to go in 'immunizing' the tormentors from prosecution once the GWOT is a memory?" This does not get an answer. So, this is all BS, a fantasy for everyman and everywoman (complete with guilty frisson of titillation).

The danger is that Cheney and all the other political obsessives on this subject in and out of government encourage those among who are quite capable of any bestiality that their furtive imaginations contrive. They hold out to the "dark ones" the possibility of accomplishing their dreams of power and domination. There are such people in any society, among any people, anywhere, and at any time. By creating a climate of permissiveness toward abuse of prisoners "for interrogation" the Cheney/Rumsfeld crowd have enabled a release of the demonic forces that, to some extent, lurk in all of us.

Now the Congress is deliberating a proposal by Senator John McCain of Arizona (who knows something about torture) which would forbid the use of torture in interrogations by intelligence personnel Cheney opposes this.

McCain wants the "limit" in what can be done to prisoners to be the US Army Field Manual on the subject. I think that would be most appropriate.

Pat Lang

http://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/

Colonel W. Patrick Lang is a retired senior officer of U.S. Military Intelligence and U.S. Army Special Forces (The Green Berets). He served in the Department of Defense both as a serving officer and then as a member of the Defense Senior Executive Service for many years. He is a highly decorated veteran of several of America’s overseas conflicts including the war in Vietnam. He was trained and educated as a specialist in the Middle East by the U.S. Army and served in that region for many years. He was the first Professor of the Arabic Language at the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York. In the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) he was the “Defense Intelligence Officer for the Middle East, South Asia and Terrorism,” and later the first Director of the Defense Humint Service.” For his service in DIA, he was awarded the “Presidential Rank of Distinguished Executive.” This is the equivalent of a British knighthood. He is an analyst consultant for many television and radio broadcasts.