A Defining Moment America: president goes to lobby for torture

[Demeter]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/14/AR2006091401587_pf.html

A Defining Moment for America
The president goes to Capitol Hill to lobby for torture.

Friday, September 15, 2006; A18



PRESIDENT BUSH rarely visits Congress. So it was a measure of his painfully skewed priorities that Mr. Bush made the unaccustomed trip yesterday to seek legislative permission for the CIA to make people disappear into secret prisons and have information extracted from them by means he dare not describe publicly.

Of course, Mr. Bush didn't come out and say he's lobbying for torture. Instead he refers to "an alternative set of procedures" for interrogation. But the administration no longer conceals what it wants. It wants authorization for the CIA to hide detainees in overseas prisons where even the International Committee of the Red Cross won't have access. It wants permission to interrogate those detainees with abusive practices that in the past have included induced hypothermia and "waterboarding," or simulated drowning. And it wants the right to try such detainees, and perhaps sentence them to death, on the basis of evidence that the defendants cannot see and that may have been extracted during those abusive interrogation sessions.

There's no question that the United States is facing a dangerous foe that uses the foulest of methods. But a wide array of generals and others who should know argue that it is neither prudent nor useful for the United States to compromise its own values in response. "I continue to read and hear that we are facing a 'different enemy' in the war on terror," retired Gen. John W. Vessey Jr., a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote in a letter to Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) this week. "No matter how true that may be, inhumanity and cruelty are not new to warfare nor to enemies we have faced in the past. . . . Through those years, we held to our own values. We should continue to do so."

Another former chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and one more intimately familiar with the war on terrorism, also weighed in this week: "The world is beginning to doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism," former general and secretary of state Colin L. Powell wrote to McCain. "To redefine Common Article 3 would add to those doubts."...Mr. Powell was referring to an article of the Geneva Conventions that prohibits cruel and degrading treatment of detainees. Mr. Bush, with support from most Republican congressional leaders, wants to redefine American obligations under the treaty. Three Republican senators -- John W. Warner of Virginia, chairman of the Armed Services Committee; Lindsey O. Graham of South Carolina; and Mr. McCain -- are bravely promoting an alternative measure that would allow terrorists to be questioned and tried without breaking faith with traditional U.S. values. The Armed Services Committee approved their bill yesterday and sent it to the Senate floor....The doubts of which Mr. Powell spoke are impeding the U.S. war effort. A president who lobbies for torture feeds those doubts even if, as we hope, Congress denies him his request.

[saltpoint]

1. The Bush administration's request for permission to torture

human beings is reprehensible.

Warner, McCain, Collins and Graham are not my usual favorite people, but this time they performed a valuable and appreciated service: they firmly told the president to cram it.

[NC_Nurse]

2. What makes these assholes ANY

different than Saddam, the man they chose to set up as the ultimate evil? They have shown themselves to be cut from the same cloth and their hypocrisy makes them even more disgusting.
I heard * speaking about this on NPR in the car yesterday and found myself SCREAMING at the radio. This man and his cronies are distorting reality and debasing our core American values.
We will end up despised in the world after these years of them in power and so FEW people seem willing to acknowledge that fact. I am sick of people trying to make the argument that they are
striving to keep us safe. What a bunch of unprincipled cowards Americans are turning out to be! It's shameful.

[Deja Q]

3. I think that's the point

What if the neocons are trying to goad the world into bombing us?

[indepat]

4. Every time the Congress ramrods an un-American law are defining

moments.

[rodeodance]

5. great post. thanks. And sad, real sad--that we have come to this.

[Joey Liberal]

6. How low we have sunk since Bush took over n/t

[ProgressiveEconomist]

7. Forget "Hail to the Chief"; Elvis's "Torture--torture, you're torturing me"

should be played whenever Dubya enters a room.

[Kolesar]

8. Stalin never had to "go lobby Congress"

How demeaning that the leader of the free world should have to put up with this. They should just do what he says. One branch of government, like Steven Colbert dreams of.

[Demeter]

9. Dubya's Attempts to Cover His Ass and Implicate His Cronies

could have such a cleansing effect on the nation! It is a sign of his own confusion, too. Either one is a unitary executive, or one isn't. Which is it, George?

By admitting that Congress has some power, if only to attempt to cover his ass, Dumbya is opening the gates of Dantes' Nine Circles of Hell for the Whole GOP.

This new season of sitcoms is really entertaining!

[Kolesar]

10. Ok. that is insightful.

I spent my youth reading everything Solzhenitsyn wrote, including the Gulag Archipelago 1 & 2. I grew up knowing that the Soviets were a horrible empire. Modern Republicanism seems eerily similar to Stalin's Soviet Union in their ways and their control of information.

I am waiting for America to realize that the broadcast networks and most newspapers are as untruthful as Pravda, the official word of the Communist Party.

[jazzjunkysue]

11. This is where the country parts company with a chimp king.

Most of us aren't going for this.

[Marrak]

12. Preznit wants permission

to go medieval on humanity...

<>

[tk2kewl]

13. I really liked how Turly referred to it on KO

He said its not a defining moment. Our defining moment was 1787.

This is a moment of redefining values that have worked for over 2 centuries.

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