On torture, will Bush stand alone?
President Bush pledged yesterday to veto the anti-torture ammendment passed, overwhelmingly, by the Senate this week.
The ammendment, which is linked to a large budget bill that provides critical army support, has pretty clear language, banning "cruel, inhuman and degrading" treatment for all prisoners held in U.S. custody. Currently, the House and the Senate are negotiating the language of the ammendment before sending it to the President.
The ammendment comes as forty detainees at Guantanamo Bay continue their hunger strike in the hopes of getting their legal right to a fair hearing before a judge. People are starving to death begging for a legal, fair trial. New reports of torture in Afghanistan and Iraq come out almost daily. How rotton can things be?
The Washington Post puts it like this:
Mr. Bush is proposing to use the first veto of his presidency on a defense bill needed to fund military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan so that he can preserve the prerogative to subject detainees to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment. In effect, he threatens to declare to the world his administration's moral bankruptcy.Well, I think this administration's moral bankruptcy has long been clear to the rest of the world, but still, it would seem that banning torture would be a no-brainer. Beside all the moral, humane, legal, just reasons for doing so, it also makes good political sense for an administration that has managed to alienate the whole Muslim world and virtually destory Iraq.
So where is Bush's brain? Well, perhaps Karl Rove was distracted by all that pesky business of having to tesitfy for a fourth time before a grand jury about the Valerie Plame leak.
