A new article by NEWSWEEK’s Michael Hirsh, “Truth About Torture”, is bound to make your blood boil. It confirms what we have all long suspected: that the use of torture by the military in Afghanistan and Iraq has been more widespread than those in charge have let on, that soldiers are still in the dark about what the policy of the DoD really is and that Donald Rumsfeld has been lying about it all.
NEWSWEEK has obtained corroboration for Fishback’s central point in the Army’s own files. According to papers released by the Defense Department in September in response to a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union, supporting documents for an inspector-general probe in July 2004 show that abuses were much more widespread than the Army acknowledged. In one IG document, an Army sergeant testifies that putting detainees in stressful positions and pouring water on them “seemed to be something all interrogators” in the Fourth Infantry Division were doing.
Fishback, headlined by NEWSWEEK as a “courageous soldier” and “plainly a very brave man. Crazy brave, even” sounded the alarm on the systemic torture he witnessed and participated in by contacting Senator John McCain and Human Rights Watch after several attempts to contact the Pentagon failed to garner a response.
McCain, of course, is one of the authors of an amendment attached to the latest defense appropriations bill to prohibit the use of torture – an amendment that had caused Bush to threaten to veto the bill with Cheney and CIA head Porter Goss backing his opposition by proposing a waiver: “…with respect to clandestine counterterrorism operations conducted abroad, with respect to terrorists who are not citizens of the United States, that are carried out by an element of the United States government other than the Department of Defense. . . if the president determines that such operations are vital to the protection of the United States or its citizens from terrorist attack.”
That’s a helluva lot of power to give to a miserable failure of a war president.
McCain is defiant and he’s not alone:
“We aren’t going to allow any weakening of language,” McCain told NEWSWEEK. If the present bill is vetoed or watered down, he adds, “we will certainly put it on another piece of legislation. I think we could get 90 votes tomorrow.” Even at senior levels of the Pentagon, some officials are uneasy about the administration’s opposition to the McCain amendment. “The uniformed military is appalled by Cheney’s stand,” says a Pentagon official who would talk only if he were not identified.
It’s up to the Republicans in congress now to prove whether they are purveyors of torture or not and whether they will allow their leaders in the WH to define them and the US as such in the eyes of the world.
