1115.org

(1)
The Bush administration is trying to spin this as a dispute about legal clarity and whether CIA interrogators are going to be protected from the risk of prosecution for doing their jobs.

It is, of course, nothing of the kind. It is a dispute about what kind of interrogation practices the CIA will be permitted to employ.

It is because President Bush is determined to employ practices like waterboarding – which are widely viewed as amounting to torture, and which the Bush administration itself acknowledges as violating the Geneva conventions – that he needs the language written by Arlen “Yes-boss” Specter into the White House approved version of the detainee treatment bill.

There would be no need to mess with redefining Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions if the CIA was simply instructed to abide by the interrogation practices prescribed for the military in the new U.S. Army Field Manual released last week. If it’s good enough for Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay – the two places where we’re famous around the world for crossing the line – surely it’s good enough for the CIA secret prisons too?

The Bush administration’s stand is very clear even if they will not put it in those words (because they’re too moral and high-minded – and God-fearing? – to say it): “We need to be able to torture high-value detainees.”

Lacking those high moral values – and showing it clearly in their language – Senators Warner, McCain and Graham are responding: “Like hell we do!”

How come nobody is calling a spade a spade in this whole discussion about the detainee treatment bills? Including the media, who are faithfully couching it all in exactly the sanitized phrases that the Bush administration has cooked up for the purpose.

From the BBC’s account of Thursday’s developments:

Speaking afterwards, Mr Bush said the stakes were high.

“If there’s not clarity, if there’s ambiguity… the program won’t go forward and the American people will be endangered,” he said.

The White House version of the bill would provide “legal clarity” to the CIA detention-interrogation program, the Warner-McCain-Graham version doesn’t. Why is Bush allowed to get away with labeling it a legal clarity issue? How about some journalistic clarity? How about refusing to let the phrase “legal clarity” be used to signify license to torture?

How come not a single mainstream media story is willing to say in so many words that the President of the United States is demanding that the law be amended to allow the CIA to torture high-value detainees? How come not a single story says plainly that the President of the United States insists that the CIA detention-interrogation program can be continued only if various forms of torture are permitted?

The President has made it absolutely clear that if Congress authorizes torture, the CIA program will be continued, and Americans can be kept safe, but if Congress refuses to authorize torture, if Congress insists that interrogation methods must comply with the Geneva conventions, the CIA program will be abandoned, thereby endangering Americans. How come no one is asking the President why we cannot work with interrogation methods that comply with the Geneva conventions?

WaPo:

At the White House, presidential spokesman Tony Snow said the alternative bill put forward by McCain, Warner and Graham was unacceptable because it would force the CIA to shut down the formerly secret program.

Bullsh**. It would only force the CIA program to come into compliance with the law, instead of forcing the law to come into compliance with the program. If the President chooses to shut the program down instead of complying with the law, that’s his decision. But he can’t go around claiming that anyone forced him to shut down the program.

(2)
The White House is engaged in an endless attempt to convince everyone that their version of the bill only seeks to clarify and define what the heck the vague language of Common Article 3 means, and that their definition does not in any restrict the scope or meaning of Common Article 3. If you have the stomach for it, read the transcript of yesterday’s White House briefing by Tony Snow. He goes on talking in circles (in his own truly inimitable style) about this for far longer than I would have believed humanly possible.

It does seem that other than George Bush and Tony Snow and Condoleezza Rice, everyone else who has opined on the subject is convinced that interrogation practices that have always been understood as violating the Geneva Conventions – practices like “hypothermia, threats of violence to the detainee and his family, stress positions, ‘long-time standing,’ prolonged sleep deprivation, and possibly waterboarding” – will be permitted once the White House version of the bill is done clarifying and defining the vague language of Common Article 3.

Which, to most people not schooled in Orwellian double-speak, means that the White House version of the bill weakens the protections that Common Article 3 is understood to afford. Which, to most people etc., means that the White House version of the bill restricts the scope or meaning of Common Article 3.

(3)
My reward for doggedly plowing through the press briefing transcript was the following:

MR. SNOW: … Five judge advocates general from the Pentagon have signed a letter, released a letter. They sent it to Duncan Hunter, who is the Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, and they also sent it to members of the Senate Armed Services Committee. And one of the things they said is, indeed, we think these provisions (the ones introduced in the White House version of the bill) would be helpful to our fighting men and women at war on behalf of our country.

There’s kind of an amusing rumor making the rounds that they were coerced into doing this. As Colonel Lindsey Graham, himself a JAG, will inform you, you don’t coerce JAGs.
[…]
Q All right, the second question is, you kind of laughed off this rumor you said on Capitol Hill that the JAG had been coerced to write this letter.

MR. SNOW: JAGs, yes.

Q The officers, the JAG officers.

MR. SNOW: Yes.

Q Senator Graham is telling reporters on Capitol Hill that the White House had them in a meeting for five hours last night and tried to force them to sign a prepared statement. And he said, reading this JAG letter they ended up writing leaves total ambiguity on interpretation. This is Senator Lindsey Graham. What’s your response to that?

MR. SNOW: It sounds like he’s talking there’s a detainee crisis.

Q Wait a minute, I think he deserves an answer, a real answer.

MR. SNOW: Well, here’s the answer — here’s the answer, the real answer is, go back and read the testimony from August.

Q Was there a meeting?

MR. SNOW: I don’t know if there — there was not a White House meeting — I don’t think so. I don’t think there was a White House meeting. I do know that they were asked to express in a letter the opinions that they had — that they had expressed in open committee, in testimony before the United States Senate — I believe it was the Judiciary Committee, maybe Armed Services — in August. I don’t know who asked.

Ask who — the thing is if you start going into who asked whom to write letters, I don’t know. We can ask each side. Here’s the important thing —

Q You say it wasn’t a White House meeting. Were there White House people there? Who called it together?

MR. SNOW: I don’t think so — I honestly — Martha, I’ll find out.

Q You’ve got to get us some clarity on that meeting.

Q It’s been reported that Jim Haynes, who is the counsel at the Pentagon, convened this meeting and got these guys to write this letter. And it’s something that they told people they didn’t agree with.

MR. SNOW: Well, I don’t think so because these — if it’s possible —

Q You don’t think so, or you know that’s not the case.

MR. SNOW: It’s not the case. They were asked to write a letter that reflected their views, and
they edited and signed the letter. Furthermore —

Q Who asked them?

MR. SNOW: I honestly don’t know. I honestly don’t know.

I can’t believe that Tony Snow tried to invoke Lindsey Graham’s name to scotch the coercion rumors. That is way beyond ironic, that is pathetic. Is Tony Snow so far out of the loop in terms of who is doing what in connection with the hottest topic of the day that he hadn’t heard that Graham himself had related the coercion story to reporters?

I don’t know about you, but I really can’t imagine Tony Snow is enjoying this job very much at all.

Meanwhile, I hereby propose that the abbreviation T.S. be admitted into comon parlance as shorthand for Tony-Snow-quality-B.S.

*** Update, 9 am ***
The Washington Post has an editorial today, entitled:
A Defining Moment for America
The president goes to Capitol Hill to lobby for torture.

The opening salvo:

President Bush rarely visits Congress. So it was a measure of his painfully skewed priorities that Mr. Bush made the unaccustomed trip yesterday to seek legislative permission for the CIA to make people disappear into secret prisons and have information extracted from them by means he dare not describe publicly.

Of course, Mr. Bush didn’t come out and say he’s lobbying for torture. Instead he refers to “an alternative set of procedures” for interrogation. But the administration no longer conceals what it wants. It wants authorization for the CIA to hide detainees in overseas prisons where even the International Committee of the Red Cross won’t have access. It wants permission to interrogate those detainees with abusive practices that in the past have included induced hypothermia and “waterboarding,” or simulated drowning. And it wants the right to try such detainees, and perhaps sentence them to death, on the basis of evidence that the defendants cannot see and that may have been extracted during those abusive interrogation sessions.

Why the heck can’t they also put some plain language into the page 1 stories?