Following up on the Senate’s 90 to 9 vote in favor of legislation that would outlaw the “cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment” of anyone detained by the United States, Vice President Dick Cheney has asked that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and other governmental entities outside of the Department of Defense be exempted from the ban. According to press reports, Cheney and CIA Director Peter Goss made the proposal last week to Republican Senator John McCain with Cheney asserting that the CIA needed to be exempt because of the need for maximum flexibility in fighting “the war on terror.” Following news of Cheney’s proposal, Human Rights Watch said that under President George W. Bush the United States has become “the only government in the world to claim a legal justification for mistreating prisoners during interrogations.” Human Rights Watch notes that other governments practice worse forms of abuse, yet no other claims that they have the legal justification for such conduct. Vice President Dick Cheney has argued specifically for the use of torture and “dark arts” in terrorism interrogations since 2002 and while Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has garnered considerable attention for his role in the abuse of detainees, Cheney has played a pivotal role in supporting torture.

Earlier this week the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) released documents showing that at least 21 detainees have been murdered at US-run detention facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is widely believed that the US government runs as many as a dozen secret detention facilities with little oversight.