Augment

Waterboarding

McCain's amendment isn't out of the woods yet. If there's anything that the Bush Administration and its congressional adherents love more than tax cuts, it has to be the freedom to torture detainees without reference to the American legal system. As covered here, observers think that opponents of McCain's amendment plan to kill the amendment in committee by "augmenting" the bill. (Thank you, Sen. Stevens, (R-AK) for today's Orwellianism. It's doubleplusgood!) The changes would exempt the CIA from prohibitions on cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of detainees. What's the bottom line?

If Stevens (read: Cheney) is successful in this endeavor, and if the Congress enacts the Amendment as so limited, it will be a major step backwards from where the law currently stands. This can't be overemphasized: If Stevens is successful at adding his seemingly innocuous "augment[ation]," it would make the law worse than it currently is.... Although the McCain Amendment would helpfully clarify and reaffirm some of the law applicable to military interrogations, it would not impose any substantive limitations on the Armed Forces that are not already in current law. The McCain Amendment would, however, emphatically reject the Administration's view that the CIA may engage in cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment in certain locations outside the U.S. -- a very significant development, but one that the Stevens "augmentation" would eviscerate. CITE

Having been in a Senate office when Guantanamo Bay first reared its ugly head over the capitol dome, the stubborn, unabashed glee with which this administration asserts its right to do whatever it likes to detainees is chilling. This administration cares about nothing but the law of might makes right. When they try to translate that into our judicial system, the resulting confusion is illuminating: see Rasul v. Bush and Hamdi v. Rumsfeld. Now, these cases aren't easy ones--Rasul v. Bush's discussion of who has sovereignty over Guantanamo Bay, while silly in reality, is a strong technical argument for the government. But the fact that the government lost those cases largely because the Bush Administration was uninterested in giving the Supreme Court even a tilth of process for the justices to hang their hats on, relegate Yaser Esam Hamdi to a barren federal prison and throw away the key--it not only hurts the American rule of law, but in the long term it hurts the war against our adversaries. Unsupervised, we meet the Lynndie Englands and Charles Graners of the world.

In large part, I hate this administration not because it has chosen to wage a global war on terror, but because it has conducted that war so ineffectually and incompetently that it were better, in the current situation, if it had never tried at all. That they profit from national tragedy while inadvertently assuring that those responsible will never be brought to justice is a tragedy that I will feel for the rest of my life.