Today, Representative Vern Ehlers voted against a bill containing a provision< that would prevent the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) from using a form of torture known as "water boarding." The House of Representative voted 222-199 to pass a version of the 2008 Intelligence Authorization bill that included language restricting the CIA to interrogation tactics outlined in the Army Field Manual. Before the vote, thirty former generals and admirals sent a letter to the chairs of the House and Senate intelligence committees urging them to support the restriction. The Bush administration has threatened to veto the bill if it passes in the Senate, arguing that it is opposed to the interrogation restrictions.
This is not the first time that Representative Ehlers has voted in a manner that may allow the United States to use "torture" in the so-called "War on Terror." In 2006, he voted for the Military Commissions Act. That bill authorized the president to interpret the "meaning and application" of the Geneva Conventions and gave the president the power to authorize interrogation techniques that may violate the Geneva Conventions. The Act also narrowed the definition of war crimes, permitting forms of interrogation that might constitute torture under international law. Human rights groups asserted that this allows the CIA use "humiliating and degrading practices" that fall short of causing "serious" physical or mental pain and/or suffering. It also offers what is essentially legal immunity for those who may have engaged in or authorized torture from September 11, 2001 to December 30, 2005, while simultaneously making it difficult for detainees to sue over mistreatment.
rrrrgh!
I rattled off the following letter after reading MM's post:
Vern Ehlers,
It has come to my attention that your recent vote was against a version of the 2008 Intelligence Authorization bill. This bill included restrictions on the CIA against torture. I would like to understand your position on this bill because our family's position and understanding is that torture is not only 100% unacceptable, but
notoriously unreliable.
We are extremely disturbed to see that the potential of this country has been severely undercut by many characteristics of contemporary presidential administrations - Democratic and Republican, but these are trends that are only possible when the political climate permits it. Current political trends have not only severely
cost us credibility amongst most of the foreign citizens at large, but has also made domestic life much more uncertain insofar as trust in checks and balances amongst the three branches of government, moral imperatives and, quite simply, consistency and transparency.
Half of my heritage is from Guatemala. It is a country that fell prey to the Eisenhower Administration, the Brothers Dulles - one as Secretary of State and one as head of the United Fruit Company/ Chiquita - and the CIA in 1954. In the 1980s the U.S. government actively assisted a Guatemalan government policy of genocide against my indigenous Mayan and other Guatemalan relations: policies that left tortured, killed and disappeared (meaning likely tortured and killed) in the amounts of 100,000 or so. I have read scores of reports and testimonials about torture and torture victims.
So, it has been over five years that I understand the Geneva Conventions are trampled on, twisted and/or ignored by U.S. warhawks of a new and disturbingly different breed. These lessons I must pass onto my sons. It is a stunningly different world that my kids are being raised in. And this is the bottom rung on the ladder of interrelations: domestic and foreign.
How does a nation-state - by policy - act against their attackers... their denigrators? Will it be to achieve justice in an enlightened manner to maintain the higher ground or at least consistency on the front of international and domestic relations? Or does it regress? If torture is given an easier hand... lower expectations, then it will be as if our policy-makers are reembracing archaic behaviors that were better left in our past histories.
In spirit,
Cliff Alles-Curie Rodas