[NV Greens] Vice President for Torture

Sat Oct 29 12:06:28 PDT 2005

This is outrageous -

Excerpt from the Yahoo editorial below.

"This week, unprecedented in history, an elected vice president of the 
United States of America proposed that Congress legally authorize the 
torture of foreigners by Americans.

"The Washington Post titled its devastating editorial "Vice President 
for Torture." I would say that the deceptive man from sunny Wyoming has 
become the Marquis de Sade of America. Think about it -- he is insistent 
upon making torturers of many of our young soldiers -- your children."

Bob T

---

washingtonpost.com
Vice President for Torture
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/25/AR2005102501388_pf.html

Wednesday, October 26, 2005; A18

VICE PRESIDENT Cheney is aggressively pursuing an initiative that may be 
unprecedented for an elected official of the executive branch: He is 
proposing that Congress legally authorize human rights abuses by 
Americans. "Cruel, inhuman and degrading" treatment of prisoners is 
banned by an international treaty negotiated by the Reagan 
administration and ratified by the United States. The State Department 
annually issues a report criticizing other governments for violating it. 
Now Mr. Cheney is asking Congress to approve legal language that would 
allow the CIA to commit such abuses against foreign prisoners it is 
holding abroad. In other words, this vice president has become an open 
advocate of torture.

His position is not just some abstract defense of presidential power. 
The CIA is holding an unknown number of prisoners in secret detention 
centers abroad. In violation of the Geneva Conventions, it has refused 
to register those detainees with the International Red Cross or to allow 
visits by its inspectors. Its prisoners have "disappeared," like the 
victims of some dictatorships. The Justice Department and the White 
House are known to have approved harsh interrogation techniques for some 
of these people, including "waterboarding," or simulated drowning; mock 
execution; and the deliberate withholding of pain medication. CIA 
personnel have been implicated in the deaths during interrogation of at 
least four Afghan and Iraqi detainees. Official investigations have 
indicated that some aberrant practices by Army personnel in Iraq 
originated with the CIA. Yet no CIA personnel have been held accountable 
for this record, and there has never been a public report on the 
agency's performance.

It's not surprising that Mr. Cheney would be at the forefront of an 
attempt to ratify and legalize this shameful record. The vice president 
has been a prime mover behind the Bush administration's decision to 
violate the Geneva Conventions and the U.N. Convention Against Torture 
and to break with decades of past practice by the U.S. military. These 
decisions at the top have led to hundreds of documented cases of abuse, 
torture and homicide in Iraq and Afghanistan. Mr. Cheney's counsel, 
David S. Addington, was reportedly one of the principal authors of a 
legal memo justifying the torture of suspects. This summer Mr. Cheney 
told several Republican senators that President Bush would veto the 
annual defense spending bill if it contained language prohibiting the 
use of cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment by any U.S. personnel.

The senators ignored Mr. Cheney's threats, and the amendment, sponsored 
by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), passed this month by a vote of 90 to 9. 
So now Mr. Cheney is trying to persuade members of a House-Senate 
conference committee to adopt language that would not just nullify the 
McCain amendment but would formally adopt cruel, inhuman and degrading 
treatment as a legal instrument of U.S. policy. The Senate's earlier 
vote suggests that it will not allow such a betrayal of American values. 
As for Mr. Cheney: He will be remembered as the vice president who 
campaigned for torture.
© 2005 The Washington Post Company

---

Yahoo! News
THE DARK HEART OF DICK CHENEY
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ucgg/20051028/cm_ucgg/thedarkheartofdickcheney&printer=1

By Georgie Anne GeyerFri Oct 28, 6:23 PM ET

WASHINGTON -- Dick Cheney is, by all accounts, probably the oddest -- 
and the most dourly ambitious -- duck in the administration's pond of 
wing-flapping, sky-diving and prideful birds.

He rarely speaks, running things quietly and secretly from behind the 
White House's closed doors, where he maintains his own administrative 
staff (roughly 60 persons, almost as many as the president's). When he 
does speak, it is usually either a sarcastic observation or rejoinder. 
As to his knowledge of Iraq, many remember how, on "Meet the Press" just 
before the Iraq war, he told Tim Russert, "I really do believe that we 
will be greeted as liberators."

He is an enigma to many who have known him. President George H.W. Bush 
almost pleaded with a friend of mine, a journalist, in Houston recently: 
"Please -- tell me -- what has happened to Cheney?"

There was always a brooding, Hobbesian Cheney just beneath the 
misleading openness he learned in his native Wyoming. But this week, the 
vice president took a turn into the deepest heart of human darkness. 
This week, unprecedented in history, an elected vice president of the 
United States of America proposed that Congress legally authorize the 
torture of foreigners by Americans.

The Washington Post titled its devastating editorial "Vice President for 
Torture." I would say that the deceptive man from sunny Wyoming has 
become the Marquis de Sade of America. Think about it -- he is insistent 
upon making torturers of many of our young soldiers -- your children.

In both the Afghan and the Iraq war, the U.S. has been involved -- as 
never before in ANY war -- with carefully conceived methods of torture 
-- "waterboarding" or simulated drowning, mock execution, beatings until 
death, the deliberate withholding of pain medication, the burning and 
desecration of enemy bodies, and every possible form of sexual perversion.

These acts were the direct outcome of the president's, Cheney's and 
Donald Rumsfeld's errant dismissal of the Geneva Accords, to which we 
are a signatory, of an international treaty against torture negotiated 
and ratified by the Reagan administration and, not least, of the Eighth 
Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids "cruel and unusual punishment."

Although such directions would HAVE to have come from the top, not one 
top-ranking general or officer has been punished. Only the privates from 
West Virginia and the Carolinas, who would be protected by a responsible 
military from debauching their service -- and themselves -- with such 
sick acts, are in jail.

But now the grand inquisitor Cheney, who took five deferments in the 
Vietnam War rather than experience it for himself, wants more. Sen. John 
McCain (news, bio, voting record), who DOES know what war is all about, 
put forward an amendment to the $440 billion military spending bill 
banning the military and all government agencies from engaging in 
torture. Ninety senators voted for the new law, including 46 
Republicans. So Cheney stepped in with a further amendment to the McCain 
amendment, which transfers torture to the CIA to use against the many 
foreign prisoners it is secretly holding abroad. These men have 
"disappeared," just like they do in the old banana republics and the 
gulags of the totalitarians.

"I suspect what Cheney's been saying to McCain is that we've got a few 
people who know the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden and the others," 
political scientist Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise 
Institution mused with me. "That we've got to use any means necessary to 
get information from very specific people. He's looking toward 
short-term goals without any understanding of the long-term 
consequences, which gets to the underlying reason why McCain is pushing 
... The rules are in place to protect US. If this becomes official 
policy, then the enemy says that they can do the same thing."

But anyone who has studied the use of torture knows it doesn't work. 
Prisoners will tell their tormentors exactly what they want to hear. 
Among Americans in Afghanistan and Iraq, too often, torture has become 
the "sport" of sociopaths. (According to Cherif Bassiouni, the renowned 
human rights and international law professor at DePaul University in 
Chicago, with fully 30 percent of our army recruits being kids with 
criminal sentences who were allowed to work their way out in the 
military, we are already courting trouble.)

Bassiouni told me that he has been called in as an expert witness on 
some of the trials of the foreigners held at Guantanamo. "You look at 
them," he told me with a deep impatience, "and you see how insignificant 
they are! One guy was a driver in Kandahar for one of the terrorists -- 
for a week. In my No. 2 case, the fellow operated a video shop."

Bassiouni then told of the private contractors who operate wholly on 
their own. He outlined how team after team of interrogators comes in. 
The first team says they "got something," so the second has to "get 
something," too. They charge $200 per hour per person to interrogate, 
and more than likely, they draw out their time clock by torturing 
prisoners. For four men for four hours, that's $3,200 of taxpayer money 
paid for the ugly demeaning of everything America once stood for. With 
the neocons and Cheney and their dark lusts, we are eating our own 
principles alive.

"America has lost its capacity for being indignant," Dr. Bassiouni 
summed up. "Where has our capacity for indignation gone? When a nation 
loses its respect for the Constitution and its treaties, what is next? 
And leaving even that aside, the next American serviceman who is being 
tortured -- and we can't go to his rescue -- will show us exactly what 
we have done."

---

Thursday, October 27, 2005
http://www.roanoke.com/printer/printpage.aspx?arcID=38042

The vice president's tortured reasoning

Congress should reject Dick Cheney's demand that the president be 
allowed to authorize torturing prisoners overseas.

In combating terrorism, the best thing the United States has going for 
it is the moral high ground. "The United States condemns unequivocally 
the despicable practice of torture," reads a 2002 State Department fact 
sheet.

Alas, the Bush administration is not so unequivocal.

Vice President Cheney is making the rounds at the Capitol, trying to 
convince members of Congress that America needs to be able to torture 
prisoners abroad.

Specifically, he wants House and Senate negotiators to modify a 
provision in the pending defense appropriation bill that would outlaw 
the use of cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment against anyone in U.S. 
custody anywhere in the world.

Cheney wants an exception for operations conducted overseas by any 
agency other than the Pentagon if the president decides torture is vital 
to protecting the country from terrorism. In other words, if President 
Bush determines attaching electrodes to a prisoner to encourage 
loquaciousness would keep America safe, he could authorize the Central 
Intelligence Agency to do so as long as operatives do it somewhere else.

Never mind that study after study has shown torture to be an ineffective 
means of extracting credible information because an abused prisoner will 
tell the torturer anything. And never mind that the United States has 
signed multiple treaties requiring humane treatment of prisoners.

Sanctioning torture betrays everything for which the United States stands.

If America casts aside its core principles, the nation loses all claims 
to the moral high ground, and thus the authority, to condemn the abuse 
of Americans captured by terrorists who employ the same despicable 
practices.

Already the administration's support of torture has created a climate in 
which mistreatment flourished at such places as the Abu Ghraib prison 
and Guantanamo Bay holding camp. Congress should curb such conduct, not 
invigorate it.

The president cannot be trusted to decide when torture is necessary to 
protect Americans from terrorism. He still propagates the discredited 
notion that the invasion of Iraq had something to do with fighting 
terrorism. He should not receive the authority to torture anyone else he 
arbitrarily declares is involved in terrorism.

Bush Tuesday described killings in Iraq as "murder, pure and simple -- 
the total rejection of justice and honor and morality and religion."

Torturing prisoners does not sustain American values reflected in a 
commitment to justice, honor, morality and religion, either.

(C)2005 The Roanoke Times