McCain on why torture must be banned

 Dear Friends,

 

Last week Bush threatened to veto the entire defense bill if it included the McCain amendment banning torture.  This would be the FIRST veto of his pResidency- to uphold the right to torture!  The Senate defied him and voted 90-9 to retain the amendment.  The bill is now back in House-Senate conference committee, where the McCain amendment is in danger of being eliminated.  You can find out who to call about this at http://www.amnestyusa.org/actioncenter/  

MCCAIN'S SENATE SPEECH ARGUING FOR A BAN ON TORTURE BY U.S. FORCES
"Several weeks ago I received a letter from Captain Ian Fishback, a member
of the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg, and a veteran of combat in
Afghanistan and Iraq. Over 17 months he struggled to get answers from his
chain of command to a basic question: what standards apply to the
treatment of enemy detainees? But he found no answers. In his remarkable
letter, he pleads with Congress, asking us to take action, to establish
standards, to clear up the confusion - not for the good of the terrorists,
but for the good of our soldiers and our country. The Captain closes his
letter by saying, "I strongly urge you to do justice to your men and women
in uniform. Give them clear standards of conduct that reflect the ideals
they risk their lives for."

 

I believe that the Congress has a responsibility to answer this call - a call that has come not just from
this one brave soldier but from so many of our men and women in uniform.
" We owe it to them, Mr. President. We sent them to fight for us in
Afghanistan and Iraq. We placed extraordinary pressure on them to extract
intelligence from detainees. But then we threw out the rules that our
soldiers had trained on, and replaced them with a confusing and constantly
changing array of standards. We demanded intelligence without ever clearly
telling our troops what was permitted and what was forbidden. And then
when things went wrong, we blamed them and we punished them. We have to do
better than that.

I can understand why some administration lawyers might want ambiguity, so
that every hypothetical option is theoretically open, even those the
President has said he does not want to exercise. But war does not occur in
theory, and our troops are not served by ambiguity. They are crying out
for clarity. The Congress cannot shrink from this duty, we cannot hide our
heads, pulling bills from the floor and avoiding votes. We owe it to our
soldiers, during this time of war, to take a stand..." (Senator John
McCain, on the floor of the U.S. Senate, October 5, 2005)
http://www.bu.edu/globalbeat/index.html#mccain