BUSH TORTURE POLICY vs. THE McCAIN AMENDMENT
05 October 2005 11:34 am by Taylor Marsh
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| Why is President Bush backing torture through the defense bill? |
One of the Senate’s old bulls is locking horns
with Majority Leader Bill Frist over a stalled
defense bill, spotlighting how fractious debate over the wartime measure
has become. … The stalemate began in July when Frist, R-Tenn., who shepherds
President Bush’s agenda through the Senate by deciding what bills get a vote,
abruptly stopped debate on the bill. That avoided a high-profile
fight over amendments, supported by Warner and sponsored by Sen. John McCain,
R-Ariz., restricting the Pentagon’s handling of detainees in the war on terror.
… The majority leader has resisted scheduling a vote even as other Republican
heavyweights bearing military credentials have lined up behind Warner. Besides
McCain, the former Vietnam War prisoner of war, they include Sen.
Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, an Air Force lawyer for 20 years,
and Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska, chairman of the defense
appropriations subcommittee.
WARNER
CHALLENGES FRIST OVER STALLED BILL
Anyone who cares about the military needs to sit up, read up
and stand up on this issue and needs to do it now.
And let’s get something straight, Senate majority leader Bill
Frist is not among the people who support our military. There’s
just no other way to say it. He even stopped the debate. Because if you do
not support the Geneva Conventions, you are asking for our troops to take
the consequences of our policies “over here” when they are captured
“over there,” and then be subjected to torture. Our rules for others
will be their rules for ours. But Frist and the Bush White House, including
our president, don’t seem to care.
What is it about civilian puke politicians thinking they know
better than seasoned military men and women?
The
McCain Amendment SA 1977, which Andrew Sullivan has printed in full on
his site, has a powerful ally in Armed Services Committee
Chairman Senator Warner. The man is a hero in my book.
President Bush has threatened a veto over it, even sending his Dick up to the
Hill to muscle Bush’s mice in the Senate to support
the boss at the expense of our military.
What part of Ian
Fishback’s plea to Senator John McCain don’t these chickenhawks
understand?
Wes Clark even
had it out with Bill O’Reilly regarding the
Hellerstein ruling, which demands more pictures be released. Clark won the
argument, because as he asserted: the only people who suffer when politicians
decide to ignore the Geneva Conventions are our troops. Disagreeing with General
Myers, Clark said he not only wanted to see the pictures, but believed everyone
up the chain of command should be held accountable for the ramifications of
allowing torture to be not only condoned, but the silent policy of the United
States government.
This is just one of the reasons Democrats have six Iraqi veterans running for
Congress in 2006.
For years, we have had to swallow the canard that the Republican Party was
not only stronger on national defense, but was a bigger friend to the military
than the Democratic Party. Granted there are some squishy peacenik people on
the far left, but most of the rank and file, hard core Democrats are not only
pro-military, but we don’t just want to send our soldiers to war. We protect
them during wartime through our policies, because we understand that it takes
not only guns and bullets to win a war, but diplomacy, treaties and international
agreements of conduct during wartime, which oftentimes separates us from our
enemies.
In fighting the “global war on terror,” George W. Bush, Dick Cheney,
Donald Rumsfeld and their allies Alberto Gonzales at Justice and Majority Leader
Frist want to surrender the American soul. Scared of their own shadow, they
actually believe indefinitely incarcerating, torturing and sending people to
others for them to torture, will keep us safe in the face of policies that insure
that our enemies multiply by the hour.
We’ve still got time to win this one. Let’s
get busy.
Because come Friday,
all bets may be off.
