Bush to Veto Waterboarding Bill

The Torturer-in-Chief has announced that he is to veto a bill outlawing waterboarding.

Bush has said the bill would harm the government's ability to prevent future attacks. Supporters of the legislation argue that it preserves the United States' right to collect critical intelligence while boosting the country's moral standing abroad.

"The bill would take away one of the most valuable tools on the war on terror, the CIA program to detain and question key terrorist leaders and operatives," deputy White House press secretary Tony Fratto said Friday.

The bill would restrict the CIA to using only the 19 interrogation techniques listed in the Army field manual.

The legislation would bar the CIA from using waterboarding, sensory deprivation or other coercive methods to break a prisoner who refuses to answer questions. Those practices were banned by the military in 2006, but the president wants the harsh interrogation methods to be a part of the CIA's toolbox.

It really is beyond belief. He used to make claims that the US did not engage in torture whilst refusing to state which acts he would think constituted torture. Now, he's just blatantly saying we need to do it to be safe.

Remember those halcyon days when Cheney used to have to deny that "a dunk in the water" was a reference to waterboarding:

Vice President Cheney said yesterday that he was not referring to an interrogation technique known as "waterboarding" when he told an interviewer this week that dunking terrorism suspects in water was a "no-brainer."

"I didn't say anything about waterboarding. . . . He didn't even use that phrase," Cheney said on a flight to Washington from South Carolina.

Indeed, Bush jumped to Cheney's defence at that point to point out that the US did not torture:

When asked about the remark, President Bush said that the United States does not use torture and was not going to. Mr Cheney is assumed by human rights groups to have been referring to "water boarding" - a technique in which suspects are made to think that they are drowning.

President Bush did not comment on particular techniques.

"This country doesn't torture, we're not going to torture," Mr Bush was quoted by the Associated Press news agency during a photo session in Washington DC.

So, whilst answering a question specifically related to waterboarding, which he knew people regarded as torture, Bush stated that the US did not engage in torture even though he knew fine well that they had engaged in waterboarding. It takes some balls to lie that blatantly.

Now, however, he no longer has to even engage in such verbal linguistics, now he comes right out and states that the CIA need to have waterboarding in their toolbox.

Ted Kennedy sums it up best:

"President Bush's veto will be one of the most shameful acts of his presidency," Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., said in a statement Friday. "Unless Congress overrides the veto, it will go down in history as a flagrant insult to the rule of law and a serious stain on the good name of America in the eyes of the world."

Not only has Bush stained the good name of America in the eyes of the world, he's engaging in a practice that is known to yield unreliable results.

Intelligence experts have made clear that they would much rather get information from country's like the UK and France than from Uzbekistan, Saudi Arabia or any other nation rumoured to torture for the simple reason that information gathered through torture tends to be garbage.

So, he's staining the US's name in pursuit of a course of action that is both counterproductive and dumb.

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Tags: Bush, waterboarding, veto, torture