The Crossed Pond

Site was down late last night, so this one had to go via email.

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In reference to your post here, in which you say:

As the commentators show their feathers to each other, see if any of them cite a single vote by the Senate or the House to define waterboarding as torture throughout the years when the Congress was fully aware of the practice. The DOJ legal analysis was the best effort of front-line lawyers in the aftermath of a massive attack on the United States. Their Congressional critics of today who did not demand a defining vote on what constituted torture are the worst sort of hypocrites. They are the lawmakers, and chose –even when House and Senate were controlled by Democrats from January 2007 to the present– to avoid passing a law bringing clarity to the very gray areas of the law of interrogation.

I will cite you two.

In 2006, Congress passed the Detainee Treatment Act, outlawing waterboarding as torture, among other things, and ruling that “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment” of prisoners in American custody anywhere in the world was against the law.

http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/F?c109:7:./temp/~c1099zTJxD:e189346:

It passed. But Senate Republicans, led by Lindsey Graham, had already done their damndest to amend the bill into irrelevancy

http://www.slate.com/id/2135240/

Regardless, Bush still appended a signing statement to it:

“The executive branch shall construe Title X in Division A of the Act, relating to detainees, in a manner consistent with the constitutional authority of the President to supervise the unitary executive branch and as Commander in Chief and consistent with the constitutional limitations on the judicial power, which will assist in achieving the shared objective of the Congress and the President, evidenced in Title X, of protecting the American people from further terrorist attacks.”

Meaning that since he considered torture “consistent with the constitutional authority of the President”, he could ignore the law at his leisure. His word on that matter, in other words, trumped what the legislative or judicial branches might deem “consistent with the constitutional authority of the President”.

You can see the roll call on that bill as well as its complete history here:

http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=h109-2863

I will leave aside the Military Commissions Act and the Supreme Court ruling in 2006 directly applicable to this question, in which the judicial and legislative branches both clearly intended to put their votes towards defining waterboarding as torture, and skip directly to March of last year. Barely a year ago.

Congress passed the Intelligence Authorization Act which would have, among other things, reaffirmed that waterboarding was, in fact, torture, and REQUIRE that the CIA and the military follow the Army Field Manual.

It passed both houses of Congress.

Bush vetoed it.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/13/AR2008021302888.html

http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSN0737119220080308

Congress then tried to override the veto, but failed, in large part because they couldn’t peel off Republicans, who claimed it was, get this, a pork barrel bill, or like John McCain, who claimed it was unnecessary to clarify since torture was already illegal.

http://cbs5.com/national/House.Democrats.Bush.2.675044.html

You can find information on that bill here:

http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c108:H.R.2417.ENR:

If your contention is that no torture opponents in Congress ever had the balls to put a vote to these interrogation methods, you’re either ridiculously naive or flat-out lying. It has come to a vote multiple times, and not only have people chosen to affirm, EVERY TIME, America’s tradition of opposing torture, but they did so in the majority of both houses of Congress. Congress explicitly banned the practice twice (arguably half a dozen times), but a minority of actors—Bush, the DoJ, yourself, for instance—managed to usurp the will of the people through their elected representatives and maneuver those duly passed laws into the same legal black holes that the detainees still live in.

In short: fuck you.

Brad Porter
TheCrossedPond.com