Shays Pushes for Anti-Torture Bill
By Mandy Kozar
WASHINGTON, Nov. 4-Brushing aside pressure from the Bush administration and threats of a presidential veto, Rep. Christopher Shays and 14 other Republican House members are pushing for anti-torture provisions to be included in the 2006 Defense Appropriations Act.
“There’s no excuse for the United States tolerating torture or inhumane treatment and the sooner we don’t the better,” Shays said. “Until we don’t we’re going to be sending mixed messages to our military personnel. We can’t become the very enemy that we’re trying to defeat.”
The mistreatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, pushed the administration’s policy on torture and interrogation into the spotlight. In a letter to the members of the House and Senate working to reconcile differences between the two chambers’ versions of the defense spending bill, Shays and 14 other Republican House members urged the chairman to retain a Senate provision banning cruel and inhumane treatment of detainees. The House bill did not include this amendment.
The amendment, introduced in the Senate by John McCain (R-Ariz.), would require that all Department of Defense personnel use only the interrogation techniques authorized by the Army Field Manual, regardless of where the prisoners are held.
McCain, who was a prisoner of war in Vietnam, said that he proposed the bill in the Senate out of concern for the safety of military troops, as well as to protect the United States’ reputation and values.
” We are Americans, and we hold ourselves to humane standards of treatment of people no matter how evil or terrible they may be,” McCain said in his statement on the Senate floor in October. “To do otherwise undermines our security, but it also undermines our greatness as a nation.”
David Danzig, spokesman for the New York-based Human Rights First, said his organization supports the amendment from both moral and pragmatic standpoints, asserting that torture is an ineffective method of interrogation.
” We’ve got tens of thousands of people in detention centers and we aren’t quite sure how to sort out the good guys from the bad guys,” Danzig said. “So when you do bad stuff you don’t know whether or not you’re doing bad stuff to bad guys.”
Fred Burton, the vice president of counter terrorism for Stratfor, a private intelligence company, and a former special agent for the U.S. Department of State, said that in his experience torture is not always a reliable interrogation method.
“I was a U.S. counterterrorism agent for many years and have debriefed a lot of terrorist victims as well as terror suspects and for the most part it has been my experience that torture is not needed to get the answers or the responses that you need,” Burton said. “For the most part whenever you are getting a confession or admission under any kind of duress it really makes one skeptical as to the motivation behind that data point.”
When the amendment was first introduced in July, the Bush administration issued a statement opposing any legislation that “would restrict the President’s authority to protect Americans effectively . . . and bring terrorists to justice.”
Since then, Vice President Dick Cheney met with senators to discuss a proposal that could exempt covert agents from the prohibition on torture.
Although supporters of the bill oppose any exemptions, Burton pointed out that excessive incidents, such as what occurred at Abu Graib, are not the norm and trying to include the CIA and other covert operatives in a general uniform policy may be reaching too far.
“What you have had is horrible isolated cases of abuse that is clearly not the norm and I’m not so sure that it requires drastic change,” Burton said. “You have to discipline and investigate and prosecute those that are the violators, but I really don’t think that from my assessment and my personal observation and personal participation in several high profile cases, that this kind of excessive behavior would be tolerate.,”
Burton further stated that this sort of legislation could limit the CIA’s intelligence-gathering ability.
McCain’s amendment passed the Senate overwhelmingly, 90 to 9.
After the vote, however, White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan told reporters in a press conference that the bill may be vetoed if it does not contain the language the president wanted.
However, this would also mean vetoing the $445 billion defense appropriations bill.
“I frankly find it amazing that the administration, which hasn’t vetoed any bill, would veto a bill that would set up a clear standard that in the United States of America we do not torture people and we treat them humanely,” Shays said.
Shays also introduced last month separate legislation that is identical to the McCain amendment.
####
