Bush: "McCain Wasn't 'Tortured'"
03 Sep 2008 10:22 am
I checked the transcript this morning and the biggest bombshell in this campaign so far, in my opinion, is the following section of Bush's speech:
John McCain's life is a story of service above self. Forty years ago, in an enemy prison camp, Lieutenant Commander McCain was offered release ahead of others who had been held longer.
His wounds were so severe that anyone would have understood if he had accepted.
John refused. For that selfless decision, he suffered nearly five more years of beatings and isolation. When he was released, his arms had been broken, but not his honor.
Fellow citizens, if the Hanoi Hilton could not break John McCain's resolve to do what is best for his country, you can be sure the angry left never will.
Now have you ever heard someone recount what was done to John McCain in the Hanoi Hilton and not use the word "torture"? I haven't. "Beatings and isolation" is a bizarre phrase to use to describe the torture that was done to John McCain. I'm sure McCain thinks so.
Am I being persnickety? As with the Trig story, there's a very easy way to find out - if the press will simply do its job. A White House reporter needs to ask the president, quite simply, if he believes that John McCain was tortured in Vietnam. Just ask. Use that specific word. See if he can answer.
The reason he put it this way, I infer, is that if he describes what was done to McCain as torture, he has incriminated himself for war crimes.
I repeat: The reason he put it this way is that if he describes what was done to McCain as torture, he has incriminated himself for war crimes.
Now prove me wrong. Please prove me wrong.
Andover law school convenes Bush War Crimes Conference - WATCH LIVE
Stephen C. Webster
Published: Saturday September 13, 2008
Saturday morning, the dean of Massachusetts School of Law at Andover will convene a two day planning session with a single focus: To arrest, put to trial and carry out sentence on criminals in the Bush Administration.
The conference, arranged by Lawrence Vevel, cofounder of the Andover school, will focus on which of Bush's officials and members of Congress could be charged with war crimes. The plan also calls for "necessary organizational structures" to be established, with the purpose of pursuing the guilty "to the ends of the Earth."
"For Bush, Richard Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and John Yoo to spend years in jail or go to the gallows for their crimes would be a powerful lesson to future American leaders," Velvel said in a media advisory.
In a published document entitled "The Long Term View" (PDF link), Vevel argues, at the very least, "there is no question" George W. Bush is guilty of conspiracy to commit torture, a war crime.
"He is a former drunk, was a serial failure in business who had to repeatedly be bailed out by daddy's friends and wanna-be-friends, was unable to speak articulately despite the finest education(s) that money and influence can buy, has a dislike of reading, so that 100-page memos have to be boiled down to one page for him, is heedless of facts and evidence, and appears not even to know the meaning of truth," said Vevel.
The conference will focus on:
# What international and domestic crimes were committed, which facts show crimes under which laws, and what punishments are possible.
# Which high level Executive officials -- and Federal judges and legislators as well, if any -- are chargeable with crimes.
# Which international tribunals, foreign tribunals and domestic tribunals (if any) can be used and how to begin cases and/or obtain prosecutions before them.
# The possibility of establishing a Chief Prosecutor’s Office such as the one at Nuremburg.
# An examination of cases already brought and their outcomes.
# Creating an umbrella Coordinating Committee with representatives from the increasing number of organizations involved in war crimes cases.
# Creating a Center to keep track of and organize compilations of relevant briefs, articles, books, opinions, and facts, etc., on war crimes and prosecutions of war criminals.
And, addressing the conference will be:
# Famed former Los Angeles prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi, author of the best-selling "The Prosecution of George W. Bush For Murder" (Vanguard).
# Phillippe Sands, Professor of Law and Director of the Centre of International Courts and Tribunals at University College, London. He is the author of "Torture Team: Rumsfeld's Memo and the Betrayal of American Values" (Penguin/Palgrave Macmillan), among other works.
# Jordan Paust, Professor of Law at the University of Houston and author of "Beyond The Law."
# Ann Wright, a former U.S. Army colonel and U.S. Foreign Service official who holds a State Department Award for Heroism and who taught the Geneva Conventions and the Law of Land Warfare at the Special Warfare Center at Ft. Bragg, N.C. She is the coauthor of "Dissent: Voices of Conscience."
# Peter Weiss, Vice President of the Center For Constitutional Rights, which was recently involved with war crimes complaints filed in Germany and France against former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and others.
# Benjamin Davis, Associate Professor at the University of Toledo College of Law and former American Legal Counsel for the Secretariat of the International Court of Arbitration.
# David Lindorff, journalist and co-author with Barbara Olshansky of "The Case for Impeachment: Legal Arguments for Removing President George W. Bush from Office"(St. Martin’s Press).
# Colleen Costello of Human Rights USA.
# Christopher Pyle, a professor at Mt. Holyoke and author of several book on international matters.
# Lawrence Velvel, a leader in the field of law school education reform, who has written numerous internet articles on issues relevant to the conference.
Watch the Bush War Crimes Conference on Saturday, 9 a.m. EST - 5:15 p.m., and Sunday 9 a.m. - 2:30 p.m. EST. in the embedded video below.
Live video by Ustream
John McCain and Bush's torture powers
An article by The New York Times's Mark Mazzetti this morning discloses a letter (.pdf) from the Justice Department to Congress which asserts "that American intelligence operatives attempting to thwart terrorist attacks can legally use interrogation methods that might otherwise be prohibited under international law." In other words, even after all of the dramatic anti-torture laws and other decrees, the Bush administration insists that American interrogators have the right to use methods that are widely considered violations of the Geneva Conventions if we decide that doing so might help "thwart terrorist attacks."
There are two reasons, and two reasons only, that the Bush administration is able to claim this power: John McCain and the Military Commissions Act. In September, 2006, McCain made a melodramatic display -- with great media fanfare -- of insisting that the MCA require compliance with the Geneva Conventions for all detainees. But while the MCA purports to require that, it also vested sole and unchallenged discretion in the President to determine what does and does not constitute a violation of the Conventions. After parading around as the righteous opponent of torture, McCain nonetheless endorsed and voted for the MCA, almost single-handedly ensuring its passage. That law pretends to compel compliance with the Conventions, while simultaneously vesting the President with the power to violate them -- precisely the power that the President is invoking here to proclaim that we have the right to use these methods. As Columbia Law Professor Michael Dorf wrote at the time:
Americans following the news coverage of the debate about how to treat captives in the ongoing military conflicts could be forgiven for believing that the bill recently passed by Congress, the Military Commissions Act ("MCA"), was a compromise between a White House seeking far-reaching powers, and Senators seeking to restrain the Executive. After all, prior to reaching an agreement with the President, four prominent Republican Senators -- Susan Collins, Lindsey Graham, John McCain, and John Warner -- had drawn a line in the sand, refusing to go along with a measure that would have redefined the Geneva Conventions' references to "outrages upon personal dignity" and "humiliating and degrading treatment." No doubt many Americans believe that because these four courageous Senators stood on moral principle, the bill that emerged, and which President Bush will certainly sign, reflects a careful balance between liberty and security.Destroying the protections of the Geneva Conventions while pretending to preserve them was accomplished by Section 6(a)(3) of the MCA (.pdf), which provides:Yet if that is what Americans believe, they are sorely mistaken. On nearly every issue, the MCA gives the White House everything it sought. It immunizes government officials for past war crimes; it cuts the United States off from its obligations under the Geneva Conventions; and it all but eliminates access to civilian courts for non-citizens -- including permanent residents whose children are citizens -- that the government, in its nearly unreviewable discretion, determines to be unlawful enemy combatants.
INTERPRETATION BY THE PRESIDENT - (A) As provided by the Constitution and this section, the President has the authority for the United States to interpret the meaning and application of the Geneva Conventions . . . .Paragraph (C) provides that such decisions "shall be authoritative" under U.S. law. McCain supported the MCA knowing that the President retained virtually unfettered discretion to decree that the interrogation methods we were using that are widely considered in the civilized world to be torture could continue. That's John McCain -- and his Principled Maverickism and alleged torture opposition -- in a nutshell. He continuously preens as some sort of independent moralizer only to use that status to endorse and enable that which he claims to oppose. In Great American Hypocrites, I wrote about his numerous deceitful maneuvers to legalize torture as follows:
The mirage-like nature of McCain's alleged convictions can be seen most clearly, and most depressingly, with his public posturing over the issue of torture. Time and again, McCain has made a dramatic showing of standing firm against the use of torture by the United States only to reveal that his so-called principles are confined to the realm of rhetoric and theater, but never action that follows through on that rhetoric.And then this year, McCain voted to oppose a ban on waterboarding, claiming that it was unnecessary given that waterboarding is already considered illegal by the Bush administration -- an assertion about which he later admitted he had no real knowledge and which is, in any event, simply untrue.In 2005, McCain led the effort in the Senate to pass the Detainee Treatment Act (DTA), which made the use of torture illegal. While claiming that he had succeeded in passing a categorical ban on torture, however, McCain meekly accepted two White House maneuvers that diluted his legislation to the point of meaningless: (1) the torture ban expressly applied only to the U.S. military, but not to the intelligence community, which was exempt, thus ensuring that the C.I.A.—the principal torture agent for the United States—could continue to torture legally; and (2) after signing the DTA into law, which passed the Senate by a vote of 90–9, President Bush issued one of his first controversial "signing statements" in which he, in essence, declared that, as President, he had the power to disregard even the limited prohibitions on torture imposed by McCain's law.
McCain never once objected to Bush's open, explicit defiance of his cherished anti-torture legislation, preferring to bask in the media’s glory while choosing to ignore the fact that his legislative accomplishment would amount to nothing. Put another way, McCain opted for the political rewards of grandstanding on the issue while knowing that he had accomplished little, if anything, in the way of actually promoting his "principles."
A virtual repeat of that sleight-of-hand occurred in 2006, when McCain first pretended to lead opposition to the Military Commissions Act (MCA), only thereafter to endorse this most radical, torture-enabling legislation, almost single-handedly ensuring its passage. After insisting that compelled adherence to the anti-torture ban of the Geneva Conventions was a nonnegotiable item for him, McCain ultimately blessed the MCA despite the fact that it left it to the President to determine, in his sole discretion, which interrogation methods did or did not comply with the Conventions' provisions.
Thus, once again, McCain created a self-image as a principled torture opponent with one hand, and with the other, ensured a legal framework that would not merely fail to ban, but would actively enable, the President’s ability to continue using interrogation methods widely considered to be torture. Indeed, by casting himself as the Supreme Arbiter of torture morality, McCain's support for this torture-enabling law became Bush and Cheney's most potent instrument for legalizing the very interrogation methods that McCain, for so long, flamboyantly claimed to oppose.
As the NYT story illustrates this morning, we continue to be a rogue nation when it comes to international norms on the treatment of detainees. The DOJ explicitly claims the right to use methods otherwise prohibited under the Conventions as long as it claims doing so is necessary to stop the Terrorists. And despite his media-sustained reputation as a righteous, principled opponent of torture, much of these disgraces are the direct by-product of John McCain's work.
McCain-Bush “anti-torture” measure gives legal cover for continued abuse
By Joe Kay and Barry Grey
17 December 2005
The agreement reached between the Bush White House and Senator John McCain on a measure ostensibly banning torture does nothing of the kind. The official disavowal of “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment” of alleged terrorists held by the US is a ploy to cover up Washington’s past defiance of international laws banning torture and provide a pseudo-legal cover for the continuation of the same methods.
The very fact that the US government is obliged to make a public disavowal of torture is a damning indictment of Washington’s lawless methods. The whole world knows that the US is employing torture and other illegal means, including abductions, secret prisons, imprisonment without charge or legal recourse, in the name of its global “war on terror.”
The agreement reached between the White House and McCain—a right-wing Republican senator and fervent supporter of the war in Iraq—is in the form of an amendment to the appropriations bill for the Department of Defense. The amendment, as agreed on by the White House and the senator, requires that the US military treat those detained by it in accordance with the Army Field Manual. It adds that no prisoner “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.”
The Bush administration, which had previously opposed any measure proscribing the use of torture on the grounds of “national security” and the “war on terrorism,” was moved to work out a deal with McCain after the senator’s original amendment was passed last month by a lopsided margin in the Senate, and a non-binding resolution supporting the amendment was adopted by a large margin on December 14 in the House of Representatives.
The crafting of the agreed-on amendment has been accompanied by proclamations from Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that the United States does not condone or employ torture. These are brazen lies.
What was Abu Ghraib? What about the evidence showing that the sadistic methods employed there were the result of policy decisions made by top Bush administration officials, including Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and then-White House counsel, now attorney general, Alberto Gonzales?
There are further revelations of prisoner abuse, up to and including murder, in Afghanistan, Iraq and at the US concentration camp in Guantánamo Bay. And there are the CIA’s secret prisons, to which the International Red Cross has, in violation of international law, been denied access.
Let us not omit the practice of “extraordinary rendition,” a euphemism for the abduction of people outside the US by American agents and their transfer to the torture chambers of foreign governments in league with Washington. At least two cases of innocent men kidnapped by the US and handed over to be tortured have been exposed: that of Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen picked up in New York and dispatched by the CIA to Syria, and Khalid al-Masri, a German who was “disappeared” from Macedonia and trundled off to be tortured in Afghanistan.
The Bush administration is utilizing, appropriately enough, the “Big Lie” propaganda methods perfected by the Hitler regime to cover up Washington’s use of barbaric practices that were employed on a more massive scale by the German fascists.
In 2001, the US officially repudiated the Geneva Conventions as applied to prisoners captured in Afghanistan. Why would the Bush administration repudiate this cornerstone of international law, if not to provide itself with a license to break the law and employ interrogation and detention practices proscribed by the Conventions?
In subsequent months, administration officials and lawyers, including Gonzales, sought to redefine torture and manufacture a pseudo-legal rationalization for its use.
For the US government’s verbal disavows of torture to be taken seriously, Washington would be obliged to officially reverse its policy on the Geneva Conventions, release all those being held illegally in Guantánamo and elsewhere, reveal the location of its secret prisons, and close its gulags down. It will do none of these things.
The McCain amendment will have no effect on US policy toward alleged terrorists detained by Washington. This policy flows organically from the drive by the American ruling elite to achieve by military force a hegemonic position in oil-rich regions such as the Middle East and Central Asia, which is deemed critical to the broader aim of establishing American imperialist hegemony on a global scale.
The hypocrisy that underlies McCain’s position was on display at his joint appearance with President Bush on Thursday. He ended his remarks praising the White House by declaring, “Now I think we can move forward with winning the war on terror and in Iraq.”
The claim that adherence to international law on the treatment of prisoners can be squared with support for the war in Iraq is a repudiation of the fundamental principle laid down at the Nuremberg trial of Nazi war criminals after World War II. The prosecution, led by US Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, insisted that the basic crime committed by the defendants, from which flowed all other crimes—including torture, the network of concentration camps, even the extermination of the European Jews—was the planning and waging of aggressive war. Bush, McCain—in fact, the entire US political establishment and both parties—defend just such a war of aggression: the unprovoked “preventive” war against Iraq, plotted years in advance and launched on the basis of lies.
The differences between McCain and the White House were from the start more a matter of form than substance. The sticking point had been the insistence of Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney that the CIA be exempted from any ban on the use of torture or abusive methods.
The real position of McCain and other congressional backers of his amendment is that such open sanction for torture is politically and militarily inexpedient. McCain is well aware that the US and forces trained and financed by Washington have long engaged in such methods, most notoriously in Latin America and Vietnam. Their basic position can be summed up as: do it, but don’t talk about it.
McCain, a Vietnam-era navy pilot who was held as a prisoner of war in Hanoi, is close to sections of the military brass. He speaks for those in the military, and the ruling elite more generally, who consider the open defense of detainee abuse to be highly damaging to the interests of American imperialism, including the struggle to crush the insurgency in Iraq and prepare future military interventions elsewhere.
They are concerned that Bush’s open repudiation of international law has undermined the ability of the US to present itself as a defender of democratic rights, that it opens up US soldiers to the same type of treatment, and that it could land American officials, military as well as civilian, in the dock in future war crimes trials.
The basic aim of the agreement reached between McCain and Bush is to provide a new legal and public relations cover behind which Washington will continue to abduct individuals and hold them indefinitely, maintain a network of secret prisons, and torture and abuse detainees.
This is underscored by both the language of the “compromise” amendment and other measures taken in conjunction with it. In working out the agreement with the White House, McCain agreed to include a provision to allow CIA officials accused of torture to argue in court that they had a reasonable belief they were following legal orders. This will serve to undermine any attempts to prosecute those who carry out torture.
There are other loopholes in the amendment. The only language that places explicit limits on the methods allowed states that no person under the control of the Department of Defense “shall be subject to any treatment or technique of interrogation not authorized by and listed in the United States Army Field Manual on Intelligence Interrogation.”
Even as the agreement between McCain and the Bush administration was being negotiated, the Pentagon was busy revising the Army Field Manual, undoubtedly to give a green light to torture and other abusive measures. The New York Times reported December 13 that the Pentagon had approved a secret addendum to the manual concerning interrogation procedures. Army officials have refused to release details on what methods are authorized, however “some military officials said the new guidelines could give the impression that the Army was pushing the limits on legal interrogation,” the Times wrote.
A separate amendment to the same Defense appropriations bill would deny habeas corpus rights to prisoners held at Guantánamo Bay. Newsweek reported on Thursday that it had obtained a new draft of the amendment, co-sponsored by Democratic Senator Carl Levin, which contains language permitting US military tribunals to use evidence obtained through the torture of prisoners in other countries. “The new Graham draft also adds more restrictions on the rights of terror detainees to sue or launch an action against the US government outside of a narrow appeals process,” the magazine wrote.
The Graham amendment passed with the support of most Democratic senators, as well as that of John McCain. This very fact demonstrates the cynicism behind the McCain amendment on inhumane treatment. With one breath its backers claim to oppose torture, with the other they support the use of “evidence” obtained through its use.
On top of this, the Bush administration defines torture so narrowly—in a manner entirely at odds with international law—that virtually any abusive method can be said to fall outside the definition. A New York Times editorial on Friday noted that hours after the McCain-White House deal was announced, “Attorney General Alberto Gonzales made it crystal clear that the administration would define torture any way it liked. He said on CNN that torture meant the intentional infliction of severe physical or mental harm, and repeated the word ‘severe’ twice. He would not even say whether that included ‘waterboarding’—tormenting a prisoner by making him think he is being drowned.”
The Washington Post editorial of the same day, which praised the amendment in general, noted that the Bush administration and the Pentagon had sought to redefine torture and inhumane treatment “as not covering in all circumstances such CIA techniques as ‘waterboarding,’ or simulated drowning; ‘cold cell,’ the deliberate induction of hypothermia; mock execution; and prolonged and painful ‘short-shackling.’”
The newspaper added that the administration’s position implied that such methods could be used on US citizens.
The administration is only able to employ such methods, and lie so brazenly to the American people, because it knows it will not be seriously challenged by the Democratic Party or the media. On the contrary, the Democratic leadership supports not only the war in Iraq, but also, whether openly or tacitly, the use of torture as an instrument US imperialist policy around the world.
See Also:
Deal to renew USA Patriot Act extends police-state measures
[13 December 2005]
Bush, Rice defend US abductions, torture, secret prisons
[7 December 2005]
Kidnapping, detention, torture: US “renditions” scandal embroils whole of Europe
[2 December 2005]
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