Sen. John McCain claimed his bill would “send a message to the world that we will not engage in torture or cruel or inhuman treatment” when in fact it did nothing of the kind. What he did was wrap a warm, fuzzy blanket of legal protection around the CIA. The McCain provisions allowed for loopholes, as James Ridgeway with Michael Roston reported in Tortured Logic McCain-Bush deal has a big loophole [ 19 December 2005 The Village Voice ].
According to Edward Alden in Bush appears to contradict anti-torture pledge [ 5 January 2006 Financial Times ], Bush “asserted that he retains the right to authorise abuse of detainees under extreme circumstances, despite agreeing to legislation last month that explicitly prohibited such treatment.” But where’s the contradiction?
In a statement attached to Mr Bush’s signing of a defence spending bill last week, the White House said it would construe the bill’s ban on “cruel, inhumane and degrading” treatment of detainees “in a manner consistent with the constitutional authority of the president” and his powers as commander-in-chief.
A senior administration official told the Boston Globe this week that while the administration intended to abide by the law, there might be extreme circumstances under which the president would have to waive the law to protect national security.
Alden goes on to report that McCain and Senator John Warner “are challenging the White House interpretation of the law, which has reintroduced the ambiguity that the legislation sought to end.”
It seems to me Bush is merely politicising McCain’s own statements as reported by Evan Thomas and Michael Hirsh in The Debate Over Torture [ 21 November 2005 Newsweek ] but is saying essentially the same thing:
Even McCain recognizes there could be rare instances when a president disobeys the law and orders a suspect tortured—say, if Al Qaeda had hidden a nuclear bomb in New York and a suspect involved in the plot had been captured. “You do what you have to do,” McCain told NEWSWEEK. “But you take responsibility for it. Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus in the Civil War, and FDR violated the Neutrality Acts before World War II.”
According to human rights and legal experts quoted in Bush could bypass new torture ban [4 January 2006 The Boston Globe ] his signing statement amounts to what Elisa Massimino, Washington director for Human Rights Watch called, an “‘in-your-face affront'” to both McCain and to Congress.” By capitalising upon McCain’s own rhetoric and using it against him?
In the meantime, the U.S. continues to torture as usual and the world knows it always will.
Update via Secrecy News:
CRS ON WARRANTLESS SURVEILLANCE
The Congressional Research Service has prepared a detailed evaluation of Bush Administration legal claims regarding Presidential authority to conduct warrantless electronic surveillance within the United States.
The CRS authors sift through each of the statutory, constitutional and other arguments that have been presented in defense of the reported NSA surveillance activity, and ultimately find them wanting.
A final determination on the matter is impossible, they note, “without an understanding of the specific facts involved and the nature of the President’s authorization, which are for the most part classified.”
In the end, however, “the Administration’s legal justification, as presented in the [December 22, 2005] summary analysis from the Office of Legislative Affairs, does not seem to be as well-grounded as the tenor of that letter suggests,” they cautiously conclude.
See “Presidential Authority to Conduct Warrantless Electronic Surveillance to Gather Foreign Intelligence Information,” Congressional Research Service, January 5, 2006 (pdf)