Olympia Snowe and Chuck Hagel are Democrats now?
A little history on the anti-torture measure:
From Feinstein on Dec 6:
Intelligence Conference Includes Feinstein-Hagel-Whitehouse-Feingold Measure that Bans Waterboarding and other Forms of Torture
From AP Dec 16:
Republicans maneuver to permit CIA use of harsh interrogation tactics
I’m not trying to attack either one of them. I’m trying to understand how important this bill is, given that we already have anti-torture legislation and given that neither of those two could be bothered to vote. As for them making it back… back from where? The Tues primary was VA-DC-MD.
I don’t know if it was political show or not. There seems to be some evidence that it was.
I don’t know. You seem to be for this bill, so why don’t you convince us that it does.
Clinton was in Texas and Obama was in Wisconsin. But them being far away is but one of several plausible explanations. My point wasn’t that you were attacking them. What I said very clearly was that while this could be an attack on them, that is irrelevant to whether the bill is significant.
By all means, show us that evidence. Are you referring to the fact that Obama and Clinton weren’t present?
It bans all interrogation techniques not found in the Army Field manual. That includes waterboarding irrespective of whether or not waterboarding is torture. Under the bill, the administration can no longer argue that waterboarding is legal because it is not technically torture. That strikes me as a good thing. Even if it doesn’t actually change the law (because the administration is simply wrong about it being torture), it may in fact change their actions since they no longer have a plausible legal argument. As you may know, Congress passed a revision to the DTA which allowed as a defense against charges of torture a belief that the action was legal. This bill, by my reading, would functionally eliminate that defense.
No, which is why I said “their fellow Republicans.”
Ah, I see you were referring solely to my second post. No, they’re not Democrats, but they were 2 of the only 3 Republicans (that I know of) to support this. Again, and I sure thought that I’d made it clear, my only problem with the Democrats in this is how it was added, and that doesn’t change if they get a few Republicans to back them. Feinstein should have gotten it added to the original version of the bill, not added in conference, or better yet, she should have pushed a stand-alone bill for this provision.
Sure, that’s understandable. The words “added in conference” have acquired a certain stench in recent years.
Still, one must wonder why principled Republicans didn’t deny cloture, as is so often their wont, and get whatever it was they actually objected to stripped from the final bill. Was anything besides anti-torture added in conference, and thus subject to stripping?
Their claim (via Bond) seems to be that had they pushed to have it stripped, the Democrats would have yelled “He/She supports torture” regarding anyone who voted to sustain the point of order. Of course, this comes from Bond, who thinks waterboarding is just peachy, so in his case one can say “If the shoe fits…”. My hunch is that they did it to protect McCain from having to choose whether to stand by his previous convictions, or flip-flop to keep a large portion of his base from getting more pissed off at him.*
ETA: * which is why I wish they hadn’t pulled the “added in conference” stunt. Let’s get the cards on the table.
Yeah, and yet they were right next door the day before. If this was so important, couldn’t they delay their trips by 1 friggin’ day?
That’s part of it. Plus the fact the we already have an anti-torture bill on the books, and that one of the most outspoken anti-torture Senators voted against this bill. Why is that?
And yet, as the OP noted, there are 10 pages of the AFM that are classified. So, what do we actually know? What I’d like to see is what is the weakness in the existing legislation that needs to be corrected, and how does this fix things?
One other thing, Richard. It’s unclear to me that we want to restrict the CIA to actions sanctioned by the Army Field Manual. This legislation may prevent the CIA from waterboarding, which would be a good thing, but it may prevent them from doing other useful things. And we may not want to telegraph to our enemies exactly what limits we place on the CIA.
At any rate, before I sign onto this bill, I’d like to know why none of the 3 presidential contenders voted for it. I’m not willing to accept “I need to campaign” as an excuse, especially since we know all three were in the area the day before. Clinton may have been in Texas on Wednesday the 13th, but that primary isn’t until March 4th.
Apparently the only thing preventing US agents from torturing prisoners at the moment is the whim of the head of Justice:
White House says waterboarding not torture
Justice Dept: Waterboarding Not Legal
Perhaps when we get a new president, their whim will also preserve the nation’s honor. However, given that the white house and Justice have permitted torture quite recently, some feel that relying on them as some sort of extralegal moral compass is a dodgey proposition; thus the push for new law.
sigh Look, short of waterboarding (we’ll just assume anything more extreme than waterboarding is definitely out of bounds), what else is there?
Actually, we know what there is. The no-visible-marks-left psychological torture – sleep deprivation, loud noises all night, heat and cold, shackling in stressed positions, threatening with dogs, defiling Korans, etc. – that our military has been documented as using on prisoners, e.g., at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. (And that’s just the stuff we know about; of the CIA “black prisons” in Europe we know nothing but their existence.) This method originally was invented by the North Koreans, and was successful in getting American POWs to appear in films falsely confessing to war crimes. U.S. interrogation experts (psychologists) studied it and determined the process is useless for any purpose but the production of false propaganda; no reliable information can be extracted, only what the subject thinks the interrogator wants to hear.
But the authorities appear to have lost sight of that distinction. The methods were used in the SERE (Survive, Evade, Resist, and Escape) program, in which American special forces personnel were put through such psychological torture to train them to resist it if captured. After 9/11, NCOs who had played the part of foreign interrogators in such simulations (but who were not psychologists or interrogation specialists) were put in charge of real interrogations and expected to get reliable information from prisoners, and for the most part they didn’t. You can read the story in Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy, by Charlie Savage, Chapter 9, “The Torture Ban.”
The CIA would like to be allowed to continue using these methods, I’m sure, but they do not come under the heading of “useful things.”
How does the new law explicitly outlaw waterboarding in a way that the old law doesn’t? Does the AFM say “no waterboarding” or does it have more general wording about cruel and degrading treatment, which is what the current law says (not sure exactly how it’s worded, but it is meant to align with the Geneva Conventions). Here is the section of the bill titled “INTELLIGENCE AND GENERAL INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY MATTERS”. My eyes glazed over a bit when I saw the length and the wording, but a page search for “water” (for waterboarding) and “army” (for army field manual) came up blank. What it seems to do, is put more reporting requirements in place wrt the “anti-torture” legislation from 2005:
sigh yourself. :rolleyes:
You have yet to demonstrate how this bill is necessary given that we already have the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005. I actually took some time to read through the bill and find out what it contains. Did you? When you have, and when you can show us what part of the bill is necessary, get back to us. I won’t be holding my breath.
I don’t know why you’re continuing to harp on this point. For the third time, it is irrelevant to whether the bill is significant. Senators running Presidential campaigns sometimes don’t vote on significant legislation. It is a fact of life. And even if you disagree, you’ve yet to address the handful of other plausible reasons I gave for why they didn’t vote.
Because that Senator is currently trying to a unite a party that is very much in favor of waterboarding. And that Senator also believed that the President would veto the bill either way. Or one of a dozen other explanations which have nothing to do with the significance of the bill.
What you’re offering is a bunch of weak circumstantial evidence for the bill being insignificant which doesn’t even match the circumstantial evidence of Bush’s promised veto. Instead of circumstantial evidence, why don’t we simply look at what the Bill does and ask ourselves whether that is significant?
The weakness in the existing legislation is what I pointed out in my last post. While it bans torture, the administration has defined torture such that they do not include waterboarding. Instead of banning torture, this bill bans all interrogation techniques not in the field manual. That way we avoid any argument over what is and what is not torture. It’s also worth noting that in addition to waterboarding, it prevents abusive sleep deprivation, use of extreme temperatures, mild beatings, etc.
More importantly, it shuts down the previously available defense to being prosecuted for torture based on a good faith belief that a particular act was legal.
It’s true that part of the Army manual is classified, but it’s only classified to us. Not to the Senate. The classified parts were approved by the same people who now oppose torture. If you assume that the classified parts include waterboarding, there are a dozen other things that now wouldn’t make any sense, including most of this administrations legal machinations over the last year.
Finally, you say that we may not want to restrict the CIA to the Army Field Manual because we do not want to telegraph our techniques to the terrorists. I disagree. Whatever value having secret interrogation techniques might have, it is far outweighed by the value of not torturing detainees. This war on terrorism, to the extent it can be called that, is in large part a PR war. We can’t kill every terrorist, we can only hope to stop or slow the recruiting, and we can’t do that when we torture people.
I’m “harping” on this because I’m trying to decide if this is important legislation or a political ploy. There is at least some circumstantial evidence that it is the latter.
Excuse me, but I think I am the only person in this thread who actually looked at the bill. You’ve offered a bunch of opinions, but you haven’t backed them up with any cites.
Look, I’m neither for nor against this bill. I can see reasons to be for it and I can see reasons to be against it. Neither has tipped the balance, in my view. But if you can cite the parts of the bill that are required, and show how the existing legislation is inadequate, then I’ll hop on board this train. From my reading of this bill, all I can see is that it increases reporting requirements. I haven’t been able to find the part that bans waterboarding (beyond what current legislation already does). But, in all honesty, maybe I missed that. Help me out with some cites from the actual legislation.
On this we will have to agree to disagree.
BTW, the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 already limits interrogation techniques to those found in the Army Field Manual:
FM 34-52 Intelligence Interrogation = US Army Field Manual on Interrogation.
Happy to help.
**Current prohibition
**
Section 1003 of the DTA: "(a) No individual in the custody or under the physical control of the United States Government, regardless of nationality or physical location, shall be subject to cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment.
. . .
(d) Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment Defined- In this section, the term ‘cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment’ means the cruel, unusual, and inhumane treatment or punishment prohibited by the Fifth, Eighth, and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution of the United States, as defined in the United States Reservations, Declarations and Understandings to the United Nations Convention Against Torture and Other Forms of Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment done at New York, December 10, 1984."
**
New prohibition**
Section 327 of the Intel. Auth. Act of 2008 : “No individual in the custody or under the effective control of an element of the intelligence community or instrumentality thereof, regardless of nationality or physical location, shall be subject to any treatment or technique of interrogation not authorized by the United States Army Field Manual on Human Intelligence Collector Operations.”
So, the Bill eliminates whatever space there is between the Army Field Manual and cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment. How much space is there is subject to debate. Which was precisely the problem. The administration felt that waterboarding, sleep deprivation, mild beating, etc., wasn’t torture, so it wasn’t subject. And even if their legal interpretation was wrong, before this bill they could still use their bad interpretation as a legal defense according to section 1004 of the DTA as revised by the MCA of 2006.
On preview: No, you’re misreading it. Section 1002 limits the DOD to the Field manual, Section 1003 is the relevant section for the CIA.
OK. So Here is what McCain has to say about this piece of legislation. I’m inclined to agree with him, and I’d rather not overly hamstring our intelligence gathering activities because Bush is going to be in office for 11 more months and someone is afraid that he’ll authorize waterboarding a detainee. If Bush wants to do that, he’s going to do that regardless of this legislation (which he already said he’d veto anyway).
It still would be interesting to see how Hillary and Obama feel about this legislation, since they would be affected by it if they win the WH in Nov. They probably don’t want to waterboard anyone, but do they want the CIA restricted to using the AFM alone? All we know is that they both voted to exempt the CIA back in 2005. If one of them wins the election, will the Democratic Congress send this bill up for presidential signature again? I guess we’ll see…
ETA: I guess we don’t actually know if either voted against the 2005 bill, but I doubt they did. 90 Senators voted for it. I’ll check later to see if I can find out who voted against.
I’ve spent the last 6 months reading FBI, NCIS, and CID accounts of OGA (which we can safely assume is usually CIA) abuse of detainees, so please spare me the incredible oversimplification of “someone is afraid that he’ll authorize waterboarding a detainee.” That’s beneath you.
We can absolutely have a good faith disagreement on the policy here. But that has nothing to do with whether this bill prevents waterboarding, sleep deprivation, and other forms of torture. It does, as I’ve shown.
We have zero evidence that the CIA needs to use non-DOD techniques to get information, but a lot of evidence that the use of such techniques results in moral catastrophes and increased terrorist recruitment. Even the military concedes that Abu Ghraib was one of the turning points in the Iraq war. Granted, the evidence that the CIA needs this power will be classified. But the CIA is entirely free to present evidence of the necessity of these techniques to the Senate. They have not persuaded the Senate so far, and that’s good enough for me.
Good news: They will make waterboarding illegal.
Bad news: They are replacing it with “aquaplanking”.
Good news: No more sleep deprivation of prisoners.
Bad news: It is being replaced with extended consciousness sessions. Participants are given all of the Red Bull and No-Doze they can swallow (whether they want it or not).
Good news: No more psychological torture!
Bad news: Prisoners must watch a non-stop film festival of the following movies:
Good news: No more defiling the Koran!
Bad news: All prisoners are given a subscription to the Jyllands-Posten newspaper.