We are a sick country and, increasingly a mad society.

The Sun's Not Yellow, It's Chicken: Why Torture Makes Perfect Sense to the Commander-in-Chief
by Steven Laffoley.


While listening to the President denying its use, I find myself thinking about American torture. And I ask myself, "At what point does a tortured man 'break'? Is it the moment when he hears his twisted arm snap behind his back? Or is it, perhaps, the moment when he sees the frayed electrical cord draw blood from his beaten skin? Or maybe it's when he feels the creeping dread of pain promised after hours without sleep, squatting on a cold cement floor, hearing the sound of footfalls moving menacingly down the hall?"

These questions are not born of morbid curiosity. Rather, these are practical questions, the banal stuff of present day American politics and policies. Because, despite the President's pale claims to the contrary, the American government does, in fact, condone the use of torture. The President himself makes this clear when he promises to veto any bill that "makes it illegal to practice the cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment or punishment" of people. And certainly his Vice President makes no apologies for the American use of torture, when he bluntly says, " Sometimes you gotta play rough."

So, why does the American government use torture? When I consider the question, two possible answers occur to me: 'dark logic' and 'madness.'

In the 'dark logic' answer, torture is not so much a means to an end as it is, in fact, the end itself. Consider, no one in the Bush administration truly believes that torture yields timely or even useful information - nor would they care if it did. The only true value of torture - a value well understood by thugs like Hitler, Pol Pot, Stalin, Saddam Hussein and now George W. Bush and Dick Cheney - is that torture terrifies people. Lots of people. It creates a deep, lasting, irrational fear of national authority: a fear felt both by the enemy abroad and by citizens at home. And, historically speaking, it is disturbingly effective.

But the 'dark logic' theory suggests that the Bush administration is rational - albeit darkly rational. And, frankly - and let's be honest here - there's not enough evidence of 'rational behavior' in the Bush Administration to support this. The other, more plausible, reason for the existence of American torture is this: 'madness.'

However, the more I consider 'madness' as the reason behind American torture, the more I am disturbed by what this 'madness' has to say, not only about George W. Bush and his administration, but also about the American people since September 11, 2001.

When I think of America's new embrace of torture, I am reminded of Bob Dylan's Tombstone Blues. Listen as Dylan sings: "John the Baptist, after torturing a thief, looks up to his hero, the commander-in-chief, saying, 'Tell me great hero, but please make it brief. Is there a hole for me to get sick in?'"

Americans in the post 9/11 Age of Unreason are Dylan's metaphoric John the Baptist after their mass conversion to President Bush's absolutist religion: 'You're either with us, or you're with the terrorists.'

Lest we be deemed 'with the terrorists,' we marched blindly behind the Commander-in-Chief, a would-be messiah who promised us deliverance from our perceived enemies and fears. Under his leadership, we willingly destroyed nations and murdered people - by the thousands, and then by the tens of thousands - in the hopes that our enemies would be vanquished and our fears finally dispelled.

But instead, over time, the Commander-in-Chief only dredged up more enemies and more fears from our collective imagination. And consequently, over time, the dead bodies only continued mounting. And consequently, over time, we descended into an immoral black hole, with no way out.

It was then, with blind rage and near religious righteousness, that we started torturing others. It was then, in the darkest of ironies, that we become the enemy we feared.

Searching for the hole to get sick in, Dylan's John the Baptist looks up. "The Commander-in-Chief answers him, while chasing a fly, 'Death to all those who would whimper and cry.' And dropping a barbell, he points to the sky, saying, 'The sun's not yellow; it's chicken.'"

As with Dylan's John the Baptist, we also look up after torturing the enemy, and stare into vacuum of the Commander-in-Chief's eyes. And as he looks back at us, we suddenly understand the President madness: he thrives on our fears.

And our gorge rises.

We look back into the hole and find ourselves getting sick, left alone with our innocence and ethics gone, left alone with only Macbeth's lament to speak: "Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood clean from my hand?"

And we weep when we realize - no, it won't.

Published on Monday, November 14, 2005 by CommonDreams.org

Steven Laffoley is an American writer living in Halifax, He is the author of Mr. Bush, Angus and Me: Notes of an American-Canadian in the Age of Unreason. E-mail: stevenlaffoley@yahoo.ca or steven_laffoley@yahoo.com.

A veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom speaks on torture

"I am a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom and an increasingly liberal defector from the GOP, and like you I have been confused by the GOP's simultaneous promotion of a 'culture of life' and of torture.
I was in Iraq in 03-04 and was really disheartened when Abu Ghraib broke in the media; I didn’t think the war was justified, ex ante, and the revelations of what was happening at the prison really made me feel like a Nazi. I employed a number of Iraqi laborers, and after the Arab media showed the photographs it was very difficult to look those guys in the eye.
As to balancing the seeming contradiction between torture and life, the only conclusion I can reach is that the pro-torture lobby has taken the rhetorical construction of 'The Terrorists' that was the centerpiece of administration pronouncements from 2001-2003 to its logical extreme – 'They' (that is, 'The Terrorists') are unworthy of life because 'They' don’t respect life. 'They' behead people, while all we do is beat them to death. 'They' hate us for 'what we are,' while we hate them for – well, I guess because of 'what They are.' But because we are a Benign Force, it's different.
In class, I compared the construction of The Terrorists to the construction of Japanese identity during World War II, assigning the John Dower book, "War Without Mercy." The enemy is so alien that he has abandoned any consideration as a human being. Consequently, exterminating him is appropriate."

Or torturing him for that matter. Wars are dangerous things. They corrupt us unless we remain vigilant. And one real worry is that because the president sincerely believes that his motives are good, he can find ways to dismiss or ignore or even condone things that are objectively wrong. This is especially a danger for those who believe their actions are sanctioned by their own God. If their motives are pure, they can do no wrong ...

from WWW.andrewsullivan.com, on November 9, 2005

WE HAVE MET THE ENEMY AND HE IS US. On Torture, practice and policy.

One of the mysteries of American public morality is why there is so little public outcry about the Bush Administration's support for torture. It's not as if this is a big secret. Each week brings a fresh revelation about U.S. treatment of prisoners in violation of the Geneva conventions. On November 2nd, the Washington Post reported that alleged members of Al Qaeda are being held in "black sites," a CIA prison system in Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay, Thailand, and Eastern European countries.
These facilities are kept secret so that they won't come under the scrutiny of Congress, the Red Cross, or other international agencies; an arrangement that permits the CIA to hold suspects for as long as they want, "off the books," and use whatever techniques they feel are necessary.

Apparently, Americans ignore the irony that we overthrew Saddam Hussein to free Iraqis from his brutality and, now, are substituting our own.

George W. Bush made the decision to ignore the Geneva Conventions the night of September 11th; Richard Clarke quoted him, "We are at war--any barriers in your way, they're gone…I don't care what the international lawyers say." The President signed a memo on February 7, 2002, declaring that the Geneva Conventions on prisoners of war did not apply to Al Qaeda or the Taliban. (It is incongruous that America's leader in the war on terror is "Christian" George Bush. The ethics of Jesus of Nazareth do not condone abuse such as torture. His Golden Rule is, "Treat people in ways that you want them to treat you.")


Immediately, misconduct began in Afghanistan. On October 10, 2001, the U.S. began dropping cluster bombs on civilian targets, followed by the use of "bunker-busters", which had a similar, savage impact. When the Taliban fell, U.S. forces and their Northern Alliance allies, mostly mercenaries, took about 8000 prisoners; of these, 5000 "disappeared." A BBC documentary (http://www.democracynow.org/afghanfilm.shtml) reported that the majority suffocated during transportation in freight containers and were buried near Sheberghan prison. Thousands of Afghani suspects have been detained, without legal recourse, and, in most cases, tortured.

Three forms of abuse take place in Iraq. Military assaults often feature weapons designed to inflict casualties on civilians, including cluster bombs, napalm, and ordinance encased in depleted uranium (http://www.hrw.org/reports/2003/usa1203). Despite the negative publicity surrounding Abu Gharaib, suspects continue to be routinely tortured in military prisons. Iraqi prisoners are referred to as "Persons Under Control" (PUCs). The November 3rd edition of the New York Review contains an article, "Torture in Iraq," from Human Rights Watch (http://hrw.org/reports/2005/us0905), which graphically detailed this abuse.

"Everyone in camp knew that if you wanted to work out your frustration you show up at the PUC tent…One day a sergeant shows up and tells a PUC to grab a pole. He told him to bend over and broke the guy’s leg with a mini Louisville Slugger that was a metal bat. He was the [expletive] cook."

A January 4, 2005, Newsweek article reported that the U.S. was considering death squads as a strategy to combat the insurgency. Recent evidence suggests that this policy has been put into effect (http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/FUL506A.html). Since the "transitional" government took over in April, more than 500 Iraqi corpses bearing evidence of torture have been counted. (The November edition of "Mother Jones" has an article about Steven Vincent who was killed investigating Basra death squads.)

While a properly conducted war on terror is a vital component of American security, such an effort does not justify abuse by U.S. forces: Torture is illegal under our law and under international treaties that we signed. Furthermore, torture is not a reliable method of obtaining information; many intelligence officers argue that torture produces unreliable results, as victims will say anything to alleviate their pain. Torture punishes the innocent as well as the guilty; U.S. authorities acknowledge that the majority of tortured prisoners, whether in Afghanistan, Guantanamo, or Iraq will eventually be released, charged with no crime. Finally, torture is immoral; it takes the philosophy of "the ends justify the means" to an extreme with no limits – more than 100 detainees have died in U.S. custody. Torture is an aggressive, moral cancer.

When the Iraq war began on March 20, 2003, there were many arguments against the invasion. None of the opponents anticipated that the eventual, compelling argument would be the loss of America’s soul: that by occupying Iraq we would take on the attributes of Saddam Hussein and his brutal regime; that 30 months later Americans would be emulating the evil dictator, torturing Iraqis in the same facilities once used by Baathist thugs; that U.S. soldiers would be as feared by Iraqi civilians as were Hussein’s henchman.

Near the end of the Vietnam-era, the comic-strip character, Pogo, spoke words as applicable now, as they were then, “We have met the enemy and he is us.

Opinion by Bob Burnett, Huffington Post, Nov 8, 2005

Media Silence on Torture?

REGARDING MEDIA
Pervasive silence about torture issue
Tim Rutten
LA Times
November 5, 2005

OF all the ways in which the American news media have failed since Sept. 11, none may be more consequential than the mild and deferential eye it has cast on the Bush administration's adoption of torture as state policy.

Who can forget the giddy months through the fall of 2001 when U.S. cable networks and newspaper op-ed pages actually staged debates — in some cases in front of live audiences —over how far we should go to "extract information" from any Al Qaeda members who fell into our hands?

Ostensibly responsible Americans — officials and commentators alike — unashamedly sat and publicly discussed not only whether torture was licit, but also how and when it should be applied.

The whole sorry spectacle reached its nadir when a purported civil libertarian, Harvard Law professor Allen Dershowitz, proposed procedures for obtaining "torture warrants." (The relevance of due process to a moral universe that sanctions the torment of other human beings is apparently an irony against which a Harvard professorship armors the mind.)

All of this was abetted by a news media that somehow found it natural to adopt the verbal evasions of our budding Torquemadas. Phrases such as "coercive interrogation" and "harsh measures" began to turn up with regularity. Nobody even bothered to wink.

One of the best is "rendition," which occurs when U.S. forces or intelligence agencies capture suspected terrorists and secretly turn them over to another country — Egypt, Jordan and Morocco apparently are favorites — where people aren't squeamish about a little coercion.

We remain an ingenious people. Who but Americans would think of outsourcing torture?

None of this is surprising. If recent history has taught us anything, it's that the road that brings hell to Earth is paved with euphemism.

This week we passed another milestone on that path, when the Washington Post's Dana Priest reported that "the CIA has been hiding and interrogating some of its most important al Qaeda captives at a Soviet-era compound in Eastern Europe, according to U.S. and foreign officials familiar with the arrangement."

In her front page account, Priest wrote, "The secret facility is part of a covert prison system set up by the CIA nearly four years ago that at various times has included sites in eight countries....The existence and locations of the facilities — referred to as 'black sites' in classified White House, CIA, Justice Department and congressional documents — are known to only a handful of officials in the United States and, usually, only to the president and a few top intelligence officials in each host country."

According to the Post's story, "The CIA and the White House ... have dissuaded Congress from demanding that the agency answer questions in open testimony about the conditions under which captives are held. Virtually nothing is known about who is kept in the facilities, what interrogation methods are employed with them, or how decisions are made about whether they should be detained or for how long."

Now, why do we suppose our government wants to hold people secretly in foreign countries? Maybe it's because they want to do things to them that would be illegal inside the United States ... like, say, torture them?

That would explain why Vice President Dick Cheney and CIA Director Porter J. Goss have so stubbornly resisted language written into the defense spending bill by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a one-time Vietnam POW, that would prohibit the cruel or inhumane treatment of any prisoner in U.S. custody, including those held by the CIA. Cheney and Goss aren't concerned, as their surrogates have argued, about tying the intelligence agencies' hands in some future, theoretical moment of national emergency. They're worried that they'll have to close down the clandestine torture chambers that are in operation now.

And the American press continues to abet their sinister evasions with an indifference to consequence and diffidence to power that only can be called what it is: moral cowardice.

Even the Post, which deserves full credit for exposing the existence of the White House's petite gulag, stepped back from the full disclosure it owed the American people. "The Washington Post is not publishing the names of the Eastern European countries involved in the covert program, at the request of senior U.S. officials," Priest wrote. "They argued that the disclosure might disrupt counterterrorism efforts in those countries and elsewhere and could make them targets of possible terrorist retaliation."

You can bet those officials argue that — and you can bet just as strongly that acceding to their demands shields the Post from being called unpatriotic, one of the favorite epithets this administration uses to bludgeon the press.

But at least the Post was willing to take the risk of exposing most of this story. What should have been a torrent of follow-up reporting and commentary by other news organizations was barely a trickle by week's end.

In fact, when a Washington-based human rights organization came forward to say it believes the CIA's secret prisons are in Poland and Romania, the only newspaper willing to print the allegations was Britain's Financial Times.

The grotesqueries presented by this sordid story are almost too numerous to list. But one likely to be overlooked deserves to be noted.

There is something particularly perverse about the United States inducing the fledgling democracies of Eastern Europe to become its accomplices in all this.

For decades, the iron curtain, captive nations and Soviet tyranny were staples of American political rhetoric — and of the U.S. news media's editorial pages. Seas of reportorial ink were spilled charting the murky reaches of the Gulag and the interlocking network of secret police agencies that maintained the cold grip of an ossified communism throughout the Eastern Bloc year after gray, numbing year.

To make these points in this connection is not to mock. We were right, and the Soviet Union and its client governments were wrong.

Now, we have to wonder whether the Bush administration fixed on Poland and Romania — or some other Eastern European democracy — precisely because it suspected that the long night of Soviet oppression had conditioned them to accept our "black sites" on their soil?

Or did we think that societies desperate for a slice of the West's prosperity wouldn't mind selling just one more little piece of their collective souls to obtain Washington recommendation to the European Union?

There was a time when American officials could stand up in public and — without blushing — describe the United States as "the leader of the free world."

Could any of them do that now that this administration has adopted torture as an instrument of state policy?

Sadly, the answer probably is yes. They lost the ability to blush when shame became a casualty of the war on terror. +++

Torture, post #3, background, Phil 301

Truth about Torture
By Michael Hirsh
Newsweek

07 November 2005 Issue

A courageous soldier and a determined senator demand clear standards.

Army Capt. Ian Fishback is plainly a very brave man. Crazy brave, even. Not only has the 26-year-old West Pointer done a tour in Iraq and one in Afghanistan, he has had the guts to suggest publicly that his boss, Donald Rumsfeld, lied to Congress. After making headlines a month ago for alleging that systematic interrogation abuses occurred in Iraq-and that the Pentagon was not forthright about it-the plain-spoken Fishback went back to Fort Bragg, N.C. He is now practicing small-unit tactics in the woods for a month as part of Special Forces training. After that, he hopes to fight for his country once again overseas.

Fishback's courage in taking a lonely stand may be paying off. Inspired by his example, "a growing critical mass of soldiers is coming forward with allegations of abuse," says Marc Garlasco of Human Rights Watch, the New York-based activist group that first revealed Fishback's story. One of them is Anthony Lagouranis, a Chicago-based Army specialist who recently left the military. He supports Fishback's contention that abuses in Iraq were systematic-and were authorized by officers in an effort to pressure detainees into talking. "I think our policies required abuse," says Lagouranis. "There were freaking horrible things people were doing. I saw [detainees] who had feet smashed with hammers. One detainee told me he had been forced by Marines to sit on an exhaust pipe, and he had a softball-sized blister to prove it. The stuff I did was mainly torture lite: sleep deprivation, isolation, stress positions, hypothermia. We used dogs."

Fishback has also won a devoted and powerful ally in Sen. John McCain, who says that the captain's tale "is what I view as the tip of the iceberg in the military today." Fishback's account has proved to be a prime exhibit in McCain's long-running feud with Rumsfeld over conduct of the Iraq war. In a long letter to Congress obtained by NEWSWEEK, Fishback told McCain and others in Congress that when the Defense secretary testified before Congress in the aftermath of the 2004 Abu Ghraib abuse scandal, Rumsfeld did not accurately represent what was occurring in Iraq.

Fishback said that many of the brutal practices shown in the Abu Ghraib photos-which the Pentagon called the work of a few rogue soldiers "on the night shift"-were actually "in accordance with what I perceived as U.S. policy." After he heard Rumsfeld testify in May 2004 that the U.S. forces were following the Geneva Conventions in Iraq, Fishback wrote: "I was immediately concerned that the Army was taking part in a lie to the Congress, which would have been a clear violation of the Constitution." Based on what he saw, Geneva rules for prisoner treatment were not being followed, he says. And for 17 months, a frustrated Fishback tried to get a clear answer about what standards were being used- consulting his superior officers, Army lawyers, even a professor of philosophy at West Point, Col. Daniel Zupan. He says he never got an answer. A devout Christian, Fishback held soul-searching discussions with fellow officers in Bible class about what he should do. In the end he went to Human Rights Watch for guidance.

Like Fishback, McCain has grown keenly frustrated by the lack of clarity in the Bush administration's interrogation policies. The Arizona senator, a former POW who was tortured in Vietnam, is now battling the administration over an amendment he has attached to the new defense appropriations bill. It would set down, once and for all, what is allowed in interrogation rooms. In simple, clear language, the two-and-a-half-page amendment forbids cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment "regardless of nationality or physical location"-and defines such treatment as the same as that which is prohibited under the U.S. Constitution. In a rebuke to President George W. Bush last month, the GOP-controlled Senate voted 90-9 to approve the McCain amendment.

The Bush administration has consistently maintained that it is not U.S. policy to abuse prisoners. But Bush has threatened to veto the entire appropriations bill if it contains McCain's language-all in an effort to preserve the right to treat prisoners in whatever way the president decides is necessary. Last week Vice President Dick Cheney, with CIA Director Porter Goss in tow, met with McCain to try to persuade him to exclude the CIA from any restrictions. The administration also sought to cut out the term "regardless of physical location," McCain said in an interview. The Washington Post, in a harsh editorial, later branded Cheney "the vice president for torture." Cheney's spokeswoman, Lea Anne McBride, said she had no comment on the McCain meeting. CIA spokeswoman Jennifer Dyck also declined to talk about it. But John Yoo, a former Justice Department official who drafted an August 2002 memo that justified rough methods, said last week that the administration should continue to treat terrorists differently overseas because they "do not operate according to the Geneva Conventions."

Critics, many of them inside the military, say Yoo and other administration hawks have never understood that U.S. observance of Geneva rules is not dependent on what the enemy does. As McCain puts it: "This isn't about who they are. This is about who we are. These are the values that distinguish us from our enemies." He says the administration could make things worse than they already are by putting a law on the books that will, in effect, authorize abusive practices at overseas facilities. "We aren't going to allow any weakening of language," McCain told NEWSWEEK. If the present bill is vetoed or watered down, he adds, "we will certainly put it on another piece of legislation. I think we could get 90 votes tomorrow." Even at senior levels of the Pentagon, some officials are uneasy about the administration's opposition to the McCain amendment. "The uniformed military is appalled by Cheney's stand," says a Pentagon official who would talk only if he were not identified.

For a year and a half now, the administration has sought to make the Abu Ghraib scandal go away. When questioned about abuses, the Pentagon regularly cites the sheer numbers of punishments it has administered to U.S. personnel-230 cases in all, including jail sentences, demotions and other nonjudicial discipline.

But Defense officials rarely point out that no senior officers or civilian officials have been charged since Abu Ghraib. Other officers say they too are seething over the lack of accountability at senior levels. Colonel Zupan, the West Point philosophy teacher, says he himself should have acted when he was deployed in Afghanistan and heard of similar abuses. "I didn't raise my eyebrows about it," he said. "I think it was wrong of me. And if I didn't, as a field officer, then how are we going to be too harsh on an enlisted soldier?"

The Army has sought to paint Fishback as a lone malcontent. Paul Boyce, an Army spokesman, says the Army Criminal Investigation Division was investigating the captain's allegations. He calls Fishback's long letter "verbiage" and says he had no comment on the questions raised about Rumsfeld's veracity. But NEWSWEEK has obtained corroboration for Fishback's central point in the Army's own files. According to papers released by the Defense Department in September in response to a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union, supporting documents for an inspector-general probe in July 2004 show that abuses were much more widespread than the Army acknowledged. In one IG document, an Army sergeant testifies that putting detainees in stressful positions and pouring water on them "seemed to be something all interrogators" in the Fourth Infantry Division were doing.

Before heading into the Fort Bragg woods this week, Fishback told NEWSWEEK that he doesn't want to talk to the media now. "I will just say: I support clear standards in accordance with American values," he said. Judging from the firestorm he started, he may someday get them.

More background (#2) on Torture, Phil 301, Midway

Vice President for Torture
The Washington Post | Editorial

Wednesday 26 October 2005

Vice President Cheney is aggressively pursuing an initiative that may be unprecedented for an elected official of the executive branch: He is proposing that Congress legally authorize human rights abuses by Americans. "Cruel, inhuman and degrading" treatment of prisoners is banned by an international treaty negotiated by the Reagan administration and ratified by the United States. The State Department annually issues a report criticizing other governments for violating it. Now Mr. Cheney is asking Congress to approve legal language that would allow the CIA to commit such abuses against foreign prisoners it is holding abroad. In other words, this vice president has become an open advocate of torture.

His position is not just some abstract defense of presidential power. The CIA is holding an unknown number of prisoners in secret detention centers abroad. In violation of the Geneva Conventions, it has refused to register those detainees with the International Red Cross or to allow visits by its inspectors. Its prisoners have "disappeared," like the victims of some dictatorships. The Justice Department and the White House are known to have approved harsh interrogation techniques for some of these people, including "waterboarding," or simulated drowning; mock execution; and the deliberate withholding of pain medication. CIA personnel have been implicated in the deaths during interrogation of at least four Afghan and Iraqi detainees. Official investigations have indicated that some aberrant practices by Army personnel in Iraq originated with the CIA. Yet no CIA personnel have been held accountable for this record, and there has never been a public report on the agency's performance.

It's not surprising that Mr. Cheney would be at the forefront of an attempt to ratify and legalize this shameful record. The vice president has been a prime mover behind the Bush administration's decision to violate the Geneva Conventions and the U.N. Convention Against Torture and to break with decades of past practice by the U.S. military. These decisions at the top have led to hundreds of documented cases of abuse, torture and homicide in Iraq and Afghanistan. Mr. Cheney's counsel, David S. Addington, was reportedly one of the principal authors of a legal memo justifying the torture of suspects. This summer Mr. Cheney told several Republican senators that President Bush would veto the annual defense spending bill if it contained language prohibiting the use of cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment by any U.S. personnel.

The senators ignored Mr. Cheney's threats, and the amendment, sponsored by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), passed this month by a vote of 90 to 9. So now Mr. Cheney is trying to persuade members of a House-Senate conference committee to adopt language that would not just nullify the McCain amendment but would formally adopt cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment as a legal instrument of U.S. policy. The Senate's earlier vote suggests that it will not allow such a betrayal of American values. As for Mr. Cheney: He will be remembered as the vice president who campaigned for torture.

On torture, debate background for Phil 301, November, 05

On our official USA endorsement of torture

Tomgram: David Cole on John Yoo and the Imperial Presidency

Here is the key passage in Senator John McCain's anti-torture amendment to the 2006 Defense Appropriations Bill (which the Bush administration has threatened to veto if it arrives so amended): "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."

Here are the August 2002 words of John Yoo, then-deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel at the Department of Justice (now a law professor at Berkeley and the author of a new book reviewed below) in his infamous "torture memo" to White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales. After hauling out many dictionaries, Yoo managed to redefine torture in the following pretzled fashion: "must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death." Thus, did a junior member of the Bush administration open the legal way for waterboarding in the White House. This is the man who, only two weeks after September 11, wrote a memo to Gonzales' deputy entitled The President's Constitutional Authority to Conduct Military Operations against Terrorists and Nations Supporting Them, which is certainly in the running for the most sweeping claim of unfettered executive power in our nation's history and which laid the (il)legal groundwork for an Iraq war of choice to come. "In the exercise of his plenary power to use military force," Yoo insisted, "the President's decisions are for him alone and are unreviewable."

Over four years later, lobbying for torture is no longer restricted to secret, high-level White House meetings, insider memos from Justice Department lawyers, or little privately scrawled notes from Donald Rumsfeld -- like the one on a November 27, 2002 memo on acceptable interrogation methods: "I stand for 8-10 hours a day. Why is standing [as a counter-resistance technique] limited to 4 hours?" Last week, on the torture side of the ledger, Vice President Cheney descended from the imperial heavens to lobby Senator McCain, a man who knows something about torture first-hand, to exempt the CIA (and possibly other secret agencies) from his amendment. According to the New York Times, here is the (tortured) wording of the exemption the Vice President was pushing:

"[The measure] shall not apply with respect to clandestine counterterrorism operations conducted abroad, with respect to terrorists who are not citizens of the United States, that are carried out by an element of the United States government other than the Department of Defense and are consistent with the Constitution and laws of the United States and treaties to which the United States is a party, if the president determines that such operations are vital to the protection of the United States or its citizens from terrorist attack."

"As for Mr. Cheney," the Washington Post editorial page commented astringently, "[h]e will be remembered as the vice president who campaigned for torture."

Last week, by the way, the ACLU released "an analysis of new and previously released autopsy and death reports of detainees held in U.S. facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan, many of whom died while being interrogated. The documents show that detainees were hooded, gagged, strangled, beaten with blunt objects, subjected to sleep deprivation and to hot and cold environmental conditions… The documents show that detainees died during or after interrogations by Navy Seals, Military Intelligence and ‘OGA' (Other Governmental Agency) -- a term, according to the ACLU, that is commonly used to refer to the CIA." Evidently, this is just everyday life in the world created by Dick Cheney and John Yoo.

As it happened, Cheney was going for the torture trifecta. The Monday after the indictment and resignation of I. Lewis Libby, he announced the appointment of a new vice-presidential chief of staff, his counsel David Addington, a man the Washington Post has identified as "a principal author of the White House memo justifying torture of terrorism suspects. He was a prime advocate of arguments supporting the holding of terrorism suspects without access to courts." These days, it seems, this is nothing short of a qualification for holding high office. After all, the three men who head our new Homeland Security State -- Alberto Gonzales, Michael Chertoff, and Donald Rumsfeld (Justice, Homeland Security, and Defense) -- were all intimately involved in creating and/or parsing pretzled definitions of torture meant to free our "commander-in-chief" to order more or less anything he wanted done to anyone at all out there in the imperium.

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