Just before 9 PM last night, the United States Senate voted 90-9 to approve the McCain Amendment (amendment 1977 to H.R. 2863). The text of the amendment is simple and straightforward:
UNIFORM STANDARDS FOR THE INTERROGATION OF PERSONS UNDER THE DETENTION OF THE DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE. (a) IN GENERAL.–No person in the custody or under the effective control of the Department of Defense or under detention in a Department of Defense facility shall be subject to any treatment or technique of interrogation not authorized by and listed in the United States Army Field Manual on Intelligence Interrogation.
(b) APPLICABILITY.–Subsection (a) shall not apply to with respect to any person in the custody or under the effective control of the Department of Defense pursuant to a criminal law or immigration law of the United States.
(c) CONSTRUCTION.–Nothing in this section shall be construed to affect the rights under the United States Constitution of any person in the custody or under the physical jurisdiction of the United States.
PROHIBITION ON CRUEL, INHUMAN, OR DEGRADING TREATMENT OR PUNISHMENT OF PERSONS UNDER CUSTODY OR CONTROL OF THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT.
(a) In General.–No individual in the custody or under the physical control of the United States Government, regardless of nationality or physical location, shall be subject to cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment.
(b) Construction.–Nothing in this section shall be construed to impose any geographical limitation on the applicability of the prohibition against cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment under this section.
(c) Limitation on Supersedure.–The provisions of this section shall not be superseded, except by a provision of law enacted after the date of the enactment of this Act which specifically repeals, modifies, or supersedes the provisions of this section.
(d) Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment Defined.–In this section, the term “cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment” means the cruel, unusual, and inhumane treatment or punishment prohibited by the Fifth, Eighth, and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution of the United States, as defined in the United States Reservations, Declarations and Understandings to the United Nations Convention Against Torture and Other Forms of Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment done at New York, December 10, 1984.
In short, the U.S. military should follow its own rules, and it shouldn’t torture people, either here or abroad. I could say the McCain amendment promotes a liberal agenda, but I’d be wrong: the measure transcends liberalism to embody what used to simply be regarded as a common-sense standard of morality held by all reasonable Americans.
Then came the misadministration of George W. Bush, which defied even this lowest standard of reasonable morality, and it became necessary for the Congress to reiterate the unacceptability of torture and the necessity of the rule of law. For months, the Bush White House fought hard against the McCain amendment, even sending Dick Cheney down to Capitol Hill personally to try to quash it. Thankfully, in the Senate common sense finally prevailed. But passage of the measure in the more solidly pro-torture Republican House is not at all assured. Even if McCain’s language survives in a bill that makes it to the White House, the Bush administration has threatened to veto the bill rather than outlaw American torture.
If you had told me when I was growing up that a single United States Senator would ever cast a vote permitting the commission of torture by the United States, I wouldn’t have believed it. But now I’m forced to face reality: Nine Senators, all of them Republicans, voted against John McCain’s amendment. The following Senators are not just out of step with liberalism. These extremists have rejected basic standards of American morality:
| Wayne Allard (R-CO) Christopher “Kit” Bond (R-MO) Tom Coburn (R-OK) |
Thad Cochran (R-MS) John Cornyn (R-TX) James Inhofe (R-OK) |
Pat Roberts (R-KS) Jeff Sessions (R-AL) Ted Stevens (R-AK) |
If you are a person with even minimal moral standards living in Alabama, Alaska, Colorado, Kansas, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, or Texas, then your elected representative has profoundly failed you. Follow the links above, get in touch with your Senator, and give them what for. Then write a letter to the editor of a local newspaper and let your fellow citizens know how low their Senator has sunk.
Thanks for posting this comment. You’re absolutely right. The 9 Senators who voted against the amendment have let us down.
I’m doubly troubled because 2 of those 9 senators are from my home state, Oklahoma, where our cherished values include faith, family, honor, etc. — but not TORTURE.
Senators Coburn and Inhofe are extremists who are out of touch with conventional standards of decency.
I’m working on that letter to the editor!
Thanks, again.
I’m not too surprised. Sen. McCain has life experience with forces that consider torture as not only acceptable, but downright fun (the North Vietnamese Army), and, therefore, knows what it’s like with the shoe on the other foot, so to speak. In short, he’s been there…while Bush and his cronies not only don’t have the foggiest clue, but their true “Family Values” and “Christian Love” have been exposed for all the world to see. It’s people like these in my government that make me ashamed to be an American at times…No, that’s not true. I’m ashamed of THEM claiming to be ANY REAL AMERICAN’S elected representative. They certainly don’t represent me.
But wait, Inhofe is a man of God! How could he possibly support torture?
I still think Iraq/Afghanistan/Gitmo thing is just the out of town try outs for what the powers that be would like to see here. The bill of rights has been pretty much reduced to a legal fiction, and they keep encrioaching little by little in domestic life. No conspiracy, just consensus. They see it as a tool, nothing more.
Ollie North and company (Poindexter with his clergyperson wife right behind him) said that for what he and his buds had planned, if there was public opposition they’d simply suspend the constitution and institute martial law. I have a feeling that we’ll see an Oranianburg or Dachau equivelant if that happens, a place for the production of horrible examples. People were released early in the regimes, so they’d talk about what happened to them.