Bush’s penchant for detainee abuse has not gone away

September 8, 2006

What a surprise, despite all of the president’s rhetoric about humane treatment of detainees, Bush’s actual proposal would allow — you guessed it — the same abusive techniques the administration has been using for years.

Many of the harsh interrogation techniques repudiated by the Pentagon on Wednesday would be made lawful by legislation put forward the same day by the Bush administration. And the courts would be forbidden from intervening.

The proposal is in the last 10 pages of an 86-page bill devoted mostly to military commissions, and it is a tangled mix of cross-references and pregnant omissions.

But legal experts say it adds up to an apparently unique interpretation of the Geneva Conventions, one that could allow C.I.A. operatives and others to use many of the very techniques disavowed by the Pentagon, including stress positions, sleep deprivation and extreme temperatures.

For all the talk about the administration choosing a new course this week, it’s amazing how little has changed.

What’s more, as Kevin Drum noted, these “alternative” interrogation techniques, as the administration is now calling them, are not only “barbaric and ineffective,” but also “precisely the kind of thing that produces blowback a hundred times worse than the meager amount of information we get from torturing these guys. It’s a recipe for losing the war against jihadism.”

Military officials are anxious to bolster this argument.

Military leaders argued this week that they did not believe abusive tactics worked in extracting information.

“No good intelligence is going to come from abusive practices. I think history tells us that. I think the empirical evidence of the last five years, hard years, tell us that,” said Lt. Gen. John Kimmons, the Army’s deputy chief of staff for intelligence.

Information extracted by abusive tactics was of questionable credibility, Kimmons said. Moreover, any good that came from the information would be undercut by the damage to America’s reputation once the abuse became known.

“And we can’t afford to go there,” he said.

No, we can’t, but Bush wants to anyway.

Let’s remember, Bush is the overgrown child who got his jollies sticking lit firecrackers inside frogs. And not just once. That sort of act by a child is seen today as a serious sign of psychopathology. And Bush as a moron psychopath is pretty much right. And with his partner in crime Cheney as the non-moron psychopath – well….

Statistically, the course orf 200 years of Presidents, it had to happen. Too bad it had to happen in our time.

  • I could name a couple of people who they should try it out on and see if they like it. If another country was doing this to our soldiers these same people would be jumping up and down complaining about it.

  • it’s amazing how little has changed

    Aw, come on, they’re trying to sell us shit in an entirely new way. Don’t you see the “new and improved” label on the packaging? Pointing out that the product technically hasn’t changed at all is just being a killjoy. You know the PR is the only thing Bushco cares about. They have completely changed the PR, what more do you want?

  • Sort of off topic, but dealing with the 14 terror detainees recently made public for American electoral purposes, I wish the Dems would start yelling about “number 15”–OBL himself. “Where is the 15th detainee, the one really responsible for 9/11. He’s still putting out al qaida propoganda films. Still doing his thing, while we have to suffer through deprivations of our own civil liberties. Where is number 15? Had President Bush not cut the troops and run out of Afghanistan to Iraq number 15 would have been with the other 14. Where is number 15?”

  • The Regal Moron says he seeks advice from his top generals. Well, how about

    “I’m not aware of any situation in the world where there is a system of jurisprudence that is recognized by civilized people, where an individual can be tried without, and convicted without seeing the evidence against him,” Brig. Gen. James C. Walker, staff judge advocate of the U.S. Marine Corps, told the panel.

    source

  • This is kind of a weird problem the Bushites have.

    They captured Abu Zubaydah and thought they had something great. But as they began to question him, they couldn’t find anything of substance out. So they decided to torture it out of him. Well, they got lots. None of it true, but lots.

    So now they have their fourteen, all of whom they’ve tortured. They want to try them so the families of 9/11/01 will get off their backs, but until they pass a retroactive law saying it was okay to torture these guys, they can’t put them up for trail.

    And of course, being morale cowards, they don’t want to stand up and admit what they did. They just want Congressional cover for it. And they want it now, before the election puts the Democrats in charge of the House.

    I’m pretty sure the Bushites now know that torture doesn’t really get reliable intelligence. But they so loved their Jack Bower on ’24’ that they had to be just like him.

    It’s a sick world they’ve created for us, isn’t it.

  • This group of [detainees] want no less than to kill you and yours. They think nothing of cutting heads off their detainees yet you still want to give them the same rights people have died to assure you. I can’t think of a thing we could do to these folks much worse than making them jump to their deaths from a burning building about to collapse. How soon we forget

  • […] yet you still want to give them the same rights people have died to assure you. I can’t think of a thing we could do to these folks much worse than making them jump to their deaths from a burning building about to collapse. — We the People, @10

    I thought *I* had a lock on bad English… 🙂 Is English *your* second language also?

    In case you’re new to US, coming from, say, Uzbekistan… and just learning about the democratic processes… “Two eyes for one” does not operate in this country (or is not supposed to). Even “an eye for an eye” operates *only with due process*. That means basic human rights — like the right to defend yourself (and, per chance, *clear* yourself of all wrong doing) should be avilable to you. Just because your neighbor — coveting your wife, cattle, whatever — accused you of terrible deeds, doesn’t mean you have committed them. If you “confessed” to spare your wife and daughter from being raped or killed (as your “interrogators” had promised), it *still* doesn’t mean you’ve committed those crimes or even intended to. You ought to have your day in an open court to be able to refute those charges.

    You might want to think about those protections in case *your* neighbour covets your wife/daughter or simply doesn’t like the way your dog poops on his front stoop every morning, because you could easily get sucked into the mangle on his say-so one day, without a chance to defend yourself, if we let the BushCo burn our Constitution (while defending our flag).

    And, even if those guys *are* what the govt says they are (which, personally, I do not believe; it’s been too long since this govt has said *anything* worth believing)… Yes, I’d *still* give them the right to defend themselves.

    I don’t want to be as bad as the effing terrorists, never mind *worse* than they are. The point of being “we the people” is to make this country better, not worse. I’d say your comments showed you were an animal, not a human, but I like most animals, and accept the fact that they cannot reason. There’s no such excuse for you.

    So go Cheney yourself

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