Our shame

Bush vetoes waterboarding bill
By DEB RIECHMANN, Associated Press Writer
8 March 2008
WASHINGTON - Democrats and human rights advocates criticized President Bush's veto Saturday of a bill that would have banned the CIA from using simulated drowning and other coercive interrogation methods to gain information from suspected terrorists.
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Bush said such tactics have helped foil terrorist plots.
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"Were it not for this program, our intelligence community believes that al-Qaida and its allies would have succeeded in launching another attack against the American homeland," the president said.

Another sad day for our country...

Of course, W can't tell us just what plots were prevented by the use of torture - telling us would imperil national security!

I realize that the Declaration of Independence isn't binding, but I can't help recalling the words:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
[emphasis added]

"... deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed"

How are We the people to grant our consent to that which is concealed from us, supposedly for our own protection?

For what it's worth, from Think Progress:

Former DIA Director Responds To Bush’s Torture Ban Veto: ‘I’d Fire Mike McConnell’
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ThinkProgress spoke with ret. Army Lt. Gen. Harry E. Soyster, who served as the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) during DESERT SHIELD/STORM. He called Bush’s veto a “mistake”:

I think that he will be sending an unclear message to the troops. … Gen. Petraeus has made it very clear in his letter to the troops that the standard is the Army Field Manual.

Soyster also sharply criticized McConnell’s defense of the techniques:

I would say that if Mike McConnell worked for me, I’d fire him. That is one of the weakest arguments. The Army has a lot of good training, 10-, 18-week courses at the school. And many of our interrogators have been in the Army for 28 years. They’re not 18-year old kids. […]

And the idea, in fact, these techniques [used by] the experts at the CIA — waterboarding, sleep deprivation, hypothermia, whatever those techniques are — it doesn’t take much expertise to use those. You know, dumb guys in the Middle Ages were doing the same thing. The KGB were strong on sleep deprivation. So there’s no skill required from the CIA. They may need those techniques because of their skill level. And they think that they need them.

Soyster added that one of the interrogation experts who had worked for him at the DIA laughed “at the idea that anyone would be so incompetent as to have to use any of these [torture] techniques.” Many interrogators, in fact, don’t even go to the extend that the Field Manual authorizes, “because good interrogators don’t need those techniques.”

Soyster also noted that the three-star commander in Afghanistan confirmed that the Army Field Manual “gives him everything he needs.”

Paraphrasing Oscar Wilde,

Torture is the last refuge of the unimaginative.
[original quotation: Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.]

To all:

1. Torture is not effective (a lesson learned even by 14th-century Inquisitors!)
2. Our use of torture puts our troops - and our citizens - at risk.
3. Our use of torture severely undermines our claim to be the bright shining beacon to the world.

One final thought:

"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil, is for good men to do nothing."
[attributed to Edmund Burke]

Stop the madness!