From the Macon Telegraph:
Mr. Bush hopes to kill the measure in the House, where the administration is lobbying the leadership. But failing that, he threatens to use the first veto of his presidency to bring down the measure.
It would be more than a shame; it would be nothing less than a national disgrace, if it comes to this. The thought of the president of the United States fighting tooth and nail to maintain the right for our military and the CIA to torture prisoners flies in the face of everything this country stands for.
If they get it down in southern Georgia, they get it everywhere. The President has been infatuated with torture since he was a child:
:::flip:::
The cookies were digested more thoroughly than the teachings.
”We were terrible to animals,” recalled Mr. Throckmorton, laughing. A dip behind the Bush home turned into a small lake after a good rain, and thousands of frogs would come out.
”Everybody would get BB guns and shoot them,” Mr. Throckmorton said. ”Or we’d put firecrackers in the frogs and throw them and blow them up.”
Such a sweet child, our President. But we here at the Frog Pond don’t take kindly to being sniped at and blown up with firecrackers.
The fate of the amendment will be decided in joint House-Senate conference. Senator Ted Stevens, who voted against the bill, will try to tinker with the language. His counterpart, Representative Bill Young, will oppose it outright.
“I do not intend to change anything he says. I intend to add to it to make sure that those people that are involved in intelligence work and are involved in difficult circumstances, say behind enemy lines, are judged by the circumstances they face,” Stevens said.
His House counterpart, Rep. Bill Young, R-Fla., is likely to challenge him.
Young questioned whether Al-Qaida and its allies should be protected under the Geneva Conventions that bar mistreatment of prisoners of war, given that the terrorist network was not a party to that agreement.
“We have an obligation to obtain as much intelligence information as we can from prisoners to save the lives of Americans who are fighting the fight,” Young said. “I don’t believe we have any obligation to these terrorists.”
No. You don’t have an obligation to the terrorists, you have an obligation to me, and to all Americans, including our troops…you flaming wingnut.
If you want to tell Bill Young what you think of his policy of torturing people, you can email him here: Bill.Young@mail.house.gov
that Bush would veto this? I can’t imagine even he would be that stupid, even though his puppeteers are in disarray. It’s wrong and bad, but I hope to hell he does.
is to get Young to kill it so he doesn’t have to exercise his first ever veto to protect his right to torture people.
And I am pretty sure that his veto would get overridden. Although I can’t be sure what the numbers would be in the House.
Young being joined by enough Reps to kill this. Not that many of them have any problem with torture, but it would virtually assure their defeat next year. So it seems to me the ball’s going to land in Bush’s court.
be much easier for Young to kill it in committee than on the floor. Look for Young to just strip it from the bill. That will be much less controversial than having over a hundred backbenchers vote to uphold Georgie’s veto.
As always, the wildcard is whether the Dems will be awake enough to yell when he tries it. Young can’t strip it out of the bill without getting committee votes, can he? If the Dems raise holy hell about the Republican committee members’ pro-torture conniving, I’d say he’ll have a hard time getting support even from his GOP colleagues.
over at a local blog last week, when I posted simply that “Wayne Allard Supports Torture.” (A similar headline appeared the next day in the Boulder Camera and Denver Post, BTW.)
But the scary thing about the back-and-forth was this: we succeeded in persuading most readers that torture as a means of getting information was at best of debatable efficacy, and at worst useless. Having conceded the point that torture does not often produce the results desired, many wingnuts still stuck by the practice, because “It’s what the terrorists deserve.”
I guess that would be Wayne Allard’s real base of support.
is not to “extract information,” as you point out, anybody with one eye and half sense (OK you point it out more politely) knows that tortured people will confess to crucifying Jesus, the Romanovs, and JonBenet with a single volley in hopes that they may be allowed the relief of death.
Torture is not intended to affect the behavior of the victim, but of those outside the “facility.”
And it does that very effectively.
The uphill battle for those opposed on moral grounds is to win converts on those grounds, and hope that their convictions are strong enough not only to sign papers that oppose torture, but to discontinue the practice.
You’re right of course. And clearly Allard’s vicious supporters believe that torture has another purpose: revenge.
But if we can take most torturers at face value (“torture produces information that saves lives”) and then discredit that argument, we can change the debate significantly.
I’ve been researching for a while now the few scholarly attempts at judging the efficacy of torture. As I’m sure you know, there are no real “studies” per se, but an overwhelming amount of anecdotal evidence that torture is not a useful tool. There are two new Princeton University Press books that deal with “Does Torture Work?” head-on, and I’ll be reading them soon.
Your point is well taken: extracting information from the victim is not the real point of torture. But many supporters see it that way still, so I want to demolish that argument before I move on.
Some days I think the real point of torture is to inure the American public to atrocities. That way, we’ll be able to keep watching TV as the unending conflict between Eurasia and Oceania continues to kill people. And perhaps we won’t flinch much when the military fuses with civilian police, and when these tactics are approved for domestic criminals.
very effectively also.
I am no fan of any particular US administration or era, nor do I cherish illusions that atrocities began in 2000, however, if something like the Abu Ghraib photos had appeared in US media ten years ago, while it is unlikely that any Washington buildings would have been stormed, I believe the number of Those Opposed would have been somewhat larger and more aggressive.
I think these are the Democratic members of the subcommittee. Wonder if there’s any way we can help them fend off this abomination?
Commmittee on Appropriations
Subcommittee on Defense
John P. Murtha, Penn., Ranking Member
Norman D. Dicks, Wash.
Martin Olav Sabo, Minn.
Peter J. Visclosky, Ind.
James P. Moran, Va.
Marcy Kaptur, Ohio
Making sure I’m right here, and this is the Defense Appropriations Act, H.R. 2863, right? Ok. Now the vote is 97 – 0 with three non-voters.
http://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_call_vote_cfm.cfm?congress=109&sessio
n=1&vote=00254
Link is to the roll call vote posed on thomas.
Seems fairly bulletproof to me, no matter what they try in the House.
I think / hope the House wouldn’t dare pass this, their first duty being to get re-elected!
(I think you’ve got numbers on the defense budget rather than the anti-torture amendment, as there were nine against the amendment.)
You’re right, on the bill, not the amendment.
The thought of the president of the United States fighting tooth and nail to maintain the right for our military and the CIA to torture prisoners flies in the face of everything this country stands for.
Must be a bunch a liver lovin’ Communists in Macon. What this country stands for? Hell, I’ll show you what this country stands for.
My God, if you can’t torture a bunch of . . . oops, wrong site, never mind.
Had me going for a minute there…numediaman!
under the Geneva Conventions that bar mistreatment of prisoners of WAR, then how does GW and company get away with referring to his “global WAR on terror”? “Illegal incursion in to the Mid East”, might be a more appropriate title then, eh?
As for the killing, or torturing of animals for its own sake. This type of behavior is often common in youngsters who have themselves been abused by adults.
Good catch, BooMan. The press outside the Beltway has probably been more awake all along, and now they are speaking out more. People are waking up, all over the nation.
One small quibble, however, in the interests of site accuracy. Macon is central Georgia, a bit north of Savannah and SE of Atlanta, not “southern.”
I thought that torture was banned in this country, that there are laws that prohibit torture.
So, can the Dictator veto existing laws??
would not veto an anti-torture amendment, but then lately I been getting the idea that I don’t know my country anymore. For example, I went to a local eatery with my wife over the weekend for a quick meal
and there was this guy sitting at the bar near us with his wife. He had a bright orange sweatshirt on with a logo that said “Club Gitmo” on the front. On the back it read “Your Tropical Retreat From The Stress OF Jihad. www.rushlimbaugh.com”
So I think you can understand my uncertainty.