Anti-Prison Abuse Bill Passes:
(but don't think Bush doesn't have more Tasers on the fire)
01.05.06 President Bush was on the losing end of an issue that was near and dear to he and Dick Cheney's heart, torturing prisoners. But while he tends to more irons he has in the fire (namely granting those pesky democratic Senators a 6-month extension of the Patriot Act, putting more right-wing extremists in government, what will come of the Valerie Plame investigation, and how far into his administration will it probe, grudgingly weighing an Iraqi troop pullout, and his illegal NSA wiretap of American citizens), questions linger as to whether this setback is an outward manifestation of his plummeting approval ratings. And to think a year ago, all Bush had to worry about was forged military documents, same-sex marriage, and Janet Jackson's boob. Those were the good old days when he pretty much had the whole world rubed. Things have changed.
As of 12/15 Senator John McCain got W to reverse his stance on torture by endorsing a bill that he drafted after months of debate. This bill prohibits "cruel, inhuman, or degrading" treatment of any detainee in US custody according to the Washington Post. My immediate reaction to this was, this news may be the first major downturn for the Bush administration, why would the president agree to a bill that makes no compromise from it's original intent? Is he desperate to regain some of his lost approval ratings? Does he have an ace up his sleeve? At any rate the House gave what the Post called veto-proof support of McCain 308-122, and the Senate previously approved the bill 90-9. A main concern was that this bill wouldn't handcuff CIA interrogators and their operatives, conservatives across the nation see McCain's measure as the US trying too hard to not look like terrorists.
Tom Malinowski of the Human Rights Watch felt the bill was a good sign: "We've gone from a sense of anything goes, to a recognition that torture hurts America even more than it hurts the enemy." The enemy couldn't be reached for comment. My question is-since we are on the subject of enemies-what factor does this bill play for African Americans in the US penal system? There are of course countless charges and evidence of prison-abuse and torture toward Black inmates at the various correctional facilities around the country, is McCain's bill just for the benefit of Middle-East born terror suspects? You can bet your paycheck that Bush or Cheney-who wasn't mentioned in the Post article, but was a major torture advocate-have not gone soft on detainee abuse. Doubtless Mr. Cheney would expect civil treatment if and when he went to jail for his two DWI's (1962 & '63) back during his youth. While McCain's bill was passing, a Lindsey Graham amendment is in the works.
Bush's ace in the hole is Guantanamo Bay, there is a new draft that would make exception to McCain's rights in the infamous Cuban facility. Their first priority is to protect the practice of detaining people indefinitely based on little or no evidence. After that Bush's torture would continue uninterrupted. The strange part about Graham is back in May he released documents where military attorneys warned the White House that their policies toward prisoners was in violation a year before we knew about Abu-Ghraib, and now here he comes trotting out a contingency; simply a transfer of they're torture policies from Abu-Ghraib (and the secret detention centers), to Guantanamo Bay. Of course McCain-though republican-is a Vietnam POW who at that time first led a handful of other republicans to help him push this bill, including Susan Collins-MA, John Warner-VA, Majority Leader Bill Frist-TN, and Graham-SC.
Fear of such abuses from members of Congress and the Senate mimics the public's fear in parts of America, torture accomplishes nothing more than a possible violent retaliation from members of al Qaeda or other terrorist groups. As with some prison guards in American holding centers, certain officers sent to foreign facilities tend to be just as sadistic, and look for the chance to act out their personal bias, twisted nationalism, and prejudices under the banner of obtaining information from terror suspects. The question is, as with the National Security Agency's illegal wiretaps, how much of these things have prevented actual potential attacks on US soil? If conservatives have a hard time distinguishing between Black crime suspects, and Black criminals, how can they be trusted to know the difference between Arab terrorist and Arab muslims?"