Bush signs law authorizing harsh interrogation | News One | Reuters.com
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President George W. Bush signed a law on Tuesday allowing tough CIA interrogation and military trials for terrorism suspects, triggering bitter election-year denunciations from Democrats.
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In a White House ceremony, Bush signed the Military Commissions Act of 2006. He said the new law, the product of frantic September negotiations when senior Republicans broke with him, would bring to trial some of those believed complicit in the September 11 attacks.The new law means Bush can continue a secret CIA program for interrogating terrorism suspects whom he believes have vital information that could thwart a plot against America.
Human rights groups charge that the measure, likely to face legal challenges that go up as far as the Supreme Court, would allow harsh techniques bordering on torture, such as sleep deprivation and induced hypothermia.
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Democrats wasted no time firing back
After years of this Congress accomplishing little to nothing, a bill that might actually bear teeth is passed, and the President had the honor of signing it into law today. Of course the dummocrats fired back. They recognize this action for what it is – something they know will hurt their surrender-monkey attitude when election day rolls around.
The Reuters slant on this article was not missed… I’m only surprised they didn’t claim the law approved outright torture.
the bill gives the President the power to define what torture is, and precludes detainees from appealing to any outside international legal body who might have a different “interpretation” of torture — so in that sense, it effectively tacitly does approve outright torture.
I personally have no problem with the appropriate application of torture. There are occasions when sitting them down and talking sternly to them just isn’t going to work.
But I do believe you’re reading too much into this law (not a bill any longer).
Your use of statements like “effectively tacitly does” only reinforce my point.
Come now, surely you’re not that naive? We already know the US military makes use of torture in its interrogations (Abu Ghraib, anyone?), and if you’re going to assert that this law wasn’t pushed through with the goal of legitemizing those practices, along with legitemizing the military tribunals to try gwot detainees, then one must wonder what the hell this law *is* for. You’re trying to sit on both sides of the fence and celebrate a bill that “might bear teeth” while simultaneously claiming “Dummocrats” (a term which truly contributes to intelligent political discourse, btw) are “reading too much” into the bill. In fact, we’ve read the very same thing into the bill and you’re in support of it, while others of us are not.
You’ve just stated that you’re pro-torture, so it’s understandable why this law doesn’t shock you. However I would ask you this — what about the detainees who are innocent and who really have nothing to do with terrorism whatsoever? Are they just flak? We torture them, maybe we get nothing, maybe we get a false confession, maybe that false confession leads to their conviction/death/further incarceration… do we not as human beings care about them?
As a corollary, does it not bother you that our application of torture to these detainees violates international law and completely erodes any moral high ground we could hope to take in matters of international conflict? We have excoriated regimes known to use torture against PoWs and conflict captives in the past, and now not only do we have no leg to stand on, but we earn the scorn of international bodies and other nations around the world who at one time saw the United States as a staunch purveyor of international justice.
If those things don’t trouble your conscience in the least, then I suppose we’ll just have to agree to disagree about the usefulness of this law.