Wednesday, October 18, 2006

Trusting the President to do the right thing


TONY SNOW: Helen, you've had your hand up, sorry.
Q: I wanted to talk about the bill the President will sign tomorrow.
MR. SNOW: Yes.
Q: It makes him a final arbiter on torture.
MR. SNOW: Right.
-- White House Press Briefing, 16 October 2006


Here is a partial list of interrogation techniques that have already been used under the Bush Administration. They include electrical torture, Palestinian hanging, severe beatings and sexual assault. Here is a list of cases in which those so-called interrogation techniques have resulted in a death.

These are the things that the President has already done, either directly through U.S. agents, or indirectly through the rendition programme, using allies as torturers-by-proxy for the United States.

If this is what Bush was willing to do before the Act, before he had ensured that the laws against what he was doing are virtually unenforceable, what do you think he will be willing to do now?

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Further reading:
List all torture incidents | List deaths | List by technique | List by location
Public support | Government policy | Accountability & cover-ups | Rendition | FoIA docs | NGO reports & legal actn
Consequences & blowback | The New Iraq & other broken promises | The media | The noble few