Bush threatens veto over torture

November 10, 2005

There’s been some debate — or at a minimum, ambiguity — over whether the president fully supports Dick Cheney’s efforts to protect the CIA’s ability to torture detainees. This week, a State Department official described Cheney’s camp as a “shrinking island,” with key administration officials, including Condoleezza Rice and John Negroponte, opposing Cheney’s position. Even Scott McClellan distanced himself from Cheney’s lobbying efforts.

So, where’s Bush in all of this? He’s in the Oval Office, threatening a veto and lobbying alongside Cheney.

As the House prepares to take up a proposed ban on abusive treatment of terrorism suspects, the Republican-led Congress appears headed toward a collision with President Bush.

It’s a fight over treatment of prisoners by U.S. interrogators that pits Bush against usual allies, such as Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, and prominent veterans, such as Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.

Bush is threatening to veto two major defense bills because they include an amendment to ban abusive treatment of detainees that the Senate has attached to both measures.

Congress may very well call his bluff. In the Senate, the torture ban was approved 90-9. In the House, Acting House Majority Leader Roy Blunt said Bush and Cheney have both lobbied House Republicans to oppose the anti-torture amendment, but Blunt told USA Today, “It’s hard to imagine it wouldn’t get a lot of votes.”

In fact, Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.), a Vietnam combat veteran who is backing the torture ban in the House, sounds optimistic.

The conservative Pennsylvania Democrat wrote in a letter to House colleagues that revelations about abuses of prisoners in U.S. custody are “degrading our society and its political and legal systems.” He says he has the votes — including some Republicans — to win House approval of McCain’s amendment.

Bush, of course, has not vetoed a single measure in five years. Would he dare use the veto pen for the first time in his presidency to support torture policies? Is he that far detached from reality?

We’ll find out soon.

Oh please, oh please, oh please, oh please. Veto it. C’mon, Bush, you know you want to. Do it, what’s the matter, chicken? Vote for torture.

I want you under 30% for Christmas. You can do it. C’mon veto it…

  • Bush said the other day that the US didn’t use torture, so why could he possibly have a problem with the bill? 🙂

  • Indeed. Veto away. Nothing will cement his lame-duck-ness faster than getting his ass handed to him when he vetoes something with no support at all.

  • I heard the reasoning for not banning torture is that we don’t want the terrorists to know they won’t be tortured if captured. So we don’t torture but we do want to give the impression that we might to scare evil-doers into telling us what we want to know, without using torture (which we don’t do).

    Is W really stupid enough to veto if the house passes witha veto-proof majority like the Senate did?

    Like everyone else I hope so. How fabulous it will be to watch!

  • Hopefully he’ll veto it, and then have a prime time television press conference explaining why he did. That would be fantastic. I would even tape it.

  • We need to say: “George, you’re a pussy if you don’t veto this. What, are you…yellow? You don’t have the balls to veto it.”

  • What a joke. He and Cheney and their small collection of renegade CIA operatives will torture whether there is a law on the books or not. I guess if he vetoes it, he will be trying to stave off another criminal act that he will be guilty of…

  • I have read the torture memos — or at least the ones, which became public, and I watch AG Gonzalves’s confirmation hearings performance. Heck, I was reading Norman Podhoretz in Commentary 25 years ago.

    I know a significant slice of the Republican Party believes that the Commander-in-Chief wields dictatorial powers “in time of war”, which, as far as they are concerned, is any time He says so. These bastards are fascists, waiting for Sulla to destroy the Republic in an authoritarian paroxysm. We may be in the process of elevating still another one of them to the Supreme Court, where he’ll decide that habeas corpus is just a good-bye.

    During the Clinton Administration, these little shits reduced the Independent Counsel statute to parody, removing that important check on the Imperial Presidency. In the 2000 election, they manipulated and then short-circuited the counting of the vote. They have consolidated the news media into a right-wing, corporate oligarchy, ready to spew propaganda.

    That they are ready to exercise the veto, for the FIRST time in five years, should not be a subject of glee, even if it seems — pray God — that they are overreaching. I don’t know that torture is universally unpopular, or that the Right-Wing capacity for monumental hypocrisy will not permit the current “don’t stop, don’t admit anything” policy to prevail.

    Regardless of what Bush does on this particular torture provision, it is worth noting that the provision in question introduces nothing new. It just reinforces laws, which the Bush Administration has already violated. Bush has already defied existing prohibitions on torture. Not to mention, existing laws and treaties regarding war and the treatment of prisoners. Read the newspapers; the Army used white phosphorus in Falluja — a war crime — >another

  • I get so tired of the reference to ours as a “time of war”. Iraq isn’t a war. It’s a monumentally huge waste of military resources in a futile effort to “win” in a fundamentally tribal (as opposed to civil or jurisdictional) society. And terrorism isn’t a war either (unless it fits into one’s definition of human nature: war on ignorance, e.g.).

    Bush isn’t a “war president” – he’s a thug, a gangster, a mass murderer, a thief, a poseur, a traitor, a usurper, a drug-damaged spoiled brat. No one from Iraq attacked, or threatened, to attack us.

    The major “crime families” refer to their occasional struggles for dominance (“going to the mattresses”) as “war”. I guess that, to the extent the Bush Crime Family resembles the Corleones, the word may be justified. But calling this a “time of war” not only inflates the apparent iimportance of the human scum comprising the current Administration. It also makes a mockery of the genuine threats our nation has overcome in the past through terrible sacrifice.

    The old Soviet press actually had a better way of describing people who, like Bush, who want to be called “war president”. They described LBJ in Vietnam simply as “western bandit leader Johnson”.

  • Right on about the “war president” and
    the “war,” Ed. And throw in the “war
    on terror,” too, which is not a war, but
    whatever the hell it is, if anything, it’s
    a colossal failure by any measure.

    But on the veto, I don’t think we’re
    going to be THAT fortunate. Self
    destructing as Bush is, they won’t
    let him go that far.

  • I like bubba’s idea. After the bill is passed, get a prominent Dem to say something like, “President Bush does not have the will nor the political capital to veto this bill. He has once again misled the people about his actions.” Throw in enough belittling comments to get him real angry. The best situation would be he vetoes the bill, which then passes again, and we get to say, “Why does the President support torture?” etc, etc.

    The bad scenario is when Bush gets so pissed he decides, like the whiny child he is, to make a show of who is in charge of the country and he attacks Syria/Iran with no authorization. The country goes down the drain and there is much wailing and gnashing of teeth. But then, hopefully the Democratic party will be cleaned up so that only the smart/tough remain, and we hang the destruction of the country around Republicans’ necks as we rebuild.

  • The shrub doesn`t have the balls to veto anything.I think we`re starting to see some of the wimp factor his daddy displayed showing up in bubble boy.

  • Shrub is a “short man”. He has “short man syndrome”. Talks big. Postures a lot. Is mean to weak people. Is rude and dismissive to anyone who isn’t a sychophant. Mouths off a lot. Has all kinds of personal weaknesses (i.e. substance addictions) he is despearately trying to cover up.

    Short man.

    Really became obvious to see him standing next to Kerry (a “tall man” in many senses of the word) and looking like the snappy little ankle-biting chihuaha he is.

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