Bush tortures more than people

Yesterday, I wrote how Congress must override Bush’s veto of a bill that would have prohibited the use of torture by the CIA. Today, I’ll elaborate on why.

I said in yesterday’s post that the army bans the torture techniques the Bush-Cheney regime promotes because “they know that such techniques are not only unreliable, they’re also counterproductive”. The military knows where the techniques come from.

Apart from waterboarding, which is a very old torture technique, the torture programme promoted by Bush-Cheney was developed during the Korean War by the Chinese and North Koreans to induce false confessions from captured American soldiers in order to create propaganda.

So, what do you suppose the Bush-Cheney torture programme got? False confessions. This has been fully documented, as has at least one case in which the torture victim was mentally ill to start out with. He provided confession after confession, then the Bush-Cheney regime leaked the confessions to the media to scare the public. They also had Colin Powell use information from a false confession as part of their ad campaign at the United Nations.

Torturing innocent people, who are eventually released, means that news that America tortures prisoners will get back to the real bad people. It provides them with a great propaganda tool and an incentive to torture Americans they capture. All without the US gaining useful information.

So, with torture being such a stupid policy (and illegal, but that’s another subject) what’s really going on here?

The Bush-Cheney regime believes that the president is omnipotent and cannot be forced to obey any law, treaty or act of Congress. When opposition to torture was at the forefront of the public mind, Congress passed John McCain’s bill outlawing waterboading. Bush signed it—and promptly issued a signing statement claiming he didn’t have to obey the law, a tactic that Bush has frequently used. John McCain remained silent about Bush’s betrayal.

What this all means is that Bush doesn’t just torture prisoners: He tortures the US Constitution and the rule of law. This is why Congress must override his veto. The issue isn’t just ending torture, important as that is. The core issue is restoration of Constitutional democracy.

One final point. John McCain has justifiably obtained a lot of sympathy from American voters because of his having been tortured. If he doesn’t stand up to Bush-Cheney and support an override of this veto—especially this veto—then he really is John McSame, and we don’t need that.