I also wanted to post this PBS News Hour link to an overview of Senate debate of the McCain anti-torture bill.
And following the overview, also to a panel discussion of two senators who are on the House-Senate Conference Committee that's now hammering out the fate of the McCain amendment, as part of the military spending bill, the first bill that was voted on.
Missouri Republican Christopher Bond was one of the nine senators who voted against the McCain amendment last month. And
Illinois Democrat Sen. Richard Durbin voted for it.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/military/july-dec05/torture_11-08.html
Some talking points from the discussion:
SEN. CHRISTOPHER BOND: The first thing we should point out is the United States Government does not condone permit, or accept torture.
I think it's important to know that existing laws already on the books were used to punish and imprison people who did those unlawful things at Abu Ghraib.
They presented us with a black eye, and we punish people who go off the reservation.
We do not permit torture, and the vice president has not come out in favor of torture.
[ On telling detainees in advance (in the McCain bill) what interrogation techniques they can expect : ]
But the point that has to be made is that we cannot set out for detainees, in advance, precisely what kinds of interrogation methods would be used. I have not been fully briefed -- I'm not in a position to get a full brief on what is permitted. But I have talked to special operatives of the CIA who operate under -- and have told me the strict guidelines under which they go and the kinds of things they do, which are no worse than what our troops go through in basic training and in the field.
...[discussing the wording of the McCain bill: ] ...it said we will lay out for the detainees precisely what kind of interrogation they will go through.
And I've talked to operatives who say that when the detainees know precisely what they're going to do, they laugh at them.
We cannot get the kind of information we need to protect our troops in the field.
[ on the limits to severity of interrogation : ]
...We don't use torture. It's not reliable. That's not what this is about. That has been mischaracterized, and it has been used politically to suggest that those of us that believe that the CIA must be able to use interrogation techniques that are no worse than what we put our special forces through in training and what my son, as a Marine recruit had to go through in his training, that's what gets the information.
[on defining "torture", and the use of torture: ] It depends how you define it, and that is the problem.
You could say that the training that our special forces go through is cruel and inhumane, and some of the things that our troops go through when they're going through the basic training is, I would say, inhuman, the kinds of things that they put up with :sleep deprivation, exposure to cold and all kinds of situations.
It does not constitute torture. I'm not going to say what tactics the CIA uses, but they're carefully defined to abide by those principles that my colleague has spoken about that we will maintain, and it does not help to have senators claiming that unless we pass this law, we will tolerate torture. We don't, we haven't, and we won't.
I love the part (at my link, but not excerpted above) where Sen. Bond brings up Sen. Durbin's nationally televised remarks a few weeks ago ( where Durbin compared U.S. military treatment of prisoners to that of the Nazis, Russian Gulags, the Cambodian Pol Pot regime's extermination of over 3 million of that nation's civilian population between 1975-1979,
ad nauseum. )
Remarks for which Sen. Durbin received so much heat for the hyperbolic distortion of his own remarks that he finally retracted them.
And in this PBS discussion, tries to deny he even made them.
This is often true of inflammatory remarks by Democrats: that if the remarks are given visibility, it exposes them to be false, and downright anti-American in their partisan rhetoric.
Smearing the reputation of our troops, branding our soldiers falsely as thugs and murderers in the eyes of the world, just to pander to the liberal fringe that is their voter-base.
Liberal rhetoric that is emotionally charged, but devoid of any factual basis.
But when repeated enough by Democrats in Washington, and reported unchallenged by a complicit liberal-dominated media, becomes
perceived as fact, although having no factual basis.
A corrosive deception that recent polls reflect.
