Forward Observer: Tortured Logic

If Vice President Dick Cheney and his allies in the Bush administration manage to kill an amendment by Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., that would forbid the CIA or other U.S. government entities from torturing captives, brutal foreign governments will be less inclined than ever to observe the narrow firebreak between life and death when abusing U.S. prisoners.

That cause and effect has been cited by McCain and others who have felt and seen the dark side of vengeance while held prisoner by another nation or an enemy.

A key part of the McCain amendment, one which the Bush administration seems to think would hobble the CIA in questioning suspected terrorists, states that "no individual in the custody or under the physical control of the United States government, regardless of nationality or physical location, shall be subject to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment."

Cheney, right after he became Defense secretary in 1989, told me that he chose not to serve in the military during the Vietnam War because "I had other priorities." President Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld never saw combat while in uniform, either. So perhaps they need to be reminded how narrow the firebreak really is today between life and deadly torture in many countries.

"We entered a barren room with a small casement window located close to the ceiling and a pair of strong spotlights focused on one gray wall where a human being was hanging from his chest by a leather strap attached to an iron ring embedded in the concrete some six feet above the cement floor," then-Navy Cmdr. Lloyd M. Bucher, skipper of the spy ship USS Pueblo, said in describing his own imprisonment and torture by the North Koreans in 1968.

"The man was barely alive, stripped to the waist so that all the black bruises covering his torso were exposed, as was the compound fracture of one limp arm with a jagged piece of bone protruding through the torn flesh. His face was a pulp in which one eyeball dangled out of its socket in a dark ooze of fluid coagulating on his cheek. He had completely chewed through his lower lip that hung in shreds from between clenched teeth...

"This is a South Korean spy we have caught," Bucher's North Korean captors shouted. "Look at his just punishment."

The North Koreans already had told Bucher they considered him and his crew spies, so they could meet the same fate if they did not confess in writing to intruding into North Korea's territorial waters with their spy ship.

Such threats and savage beatings day and night eventually broke the spirit of the American prisoners. They signed false confessions, as did many U.S. prisoners tortured by the North Vietnamese during the Vietnam War.

But the North Koreans and North Vietnamese stopped short of killing their American captives and tried to cover up bruises and other signs of torture before they were freed. The firebreak dug by the fear of international condemnation stayed their hand. But any U.S. government act that exempted the CIA or any other American agency from McCain's anti-torture amendment would almost certainly wipe away restraint while further blackening the United States' image abroad.

The Senate has passed the McCain anti-torture amendment twice, once as part of the fiscal 2006 Defense appropriations bill and again as an addition to the defense authorization bill.

One of McCain's fears is that the House, during a conference with the Senate on the appropriations measure, will strip his amendment on the grounds that it is now in the Senate's defense authorization bill. Then, warn backers of the McCain amendment, the House Republican majority, at the urging of the White House, will keep the defense authorization bill from being passed at all this year.

If such legislative hijinks make McCain's anti-torture amendment die on the vine this year, the senator has vowed to try to add it to "every vehicle that goes through this body because you cannot override the majority of the American people and their elected representatives in a functioning democracy."

McCain contends that amendment merely underscores longstanding U.S. policy regarding the treatment of prisoners as set forth in such documents as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the Convention Against Torture negotiated by the Reagan administration and ratified by the Senate.

"Nevertheless," said the former POW who was tortured by the North Vietnamese, "the administration has held that the prohibition does not legally apply to foreigners held overseas. They can, apparently, be treated inhumanely. That means America is the only country in the world that asserts a legal right to engage in cruel and inhumane treatment. How far have we come?

"The enemy we fight has no respect for human life or human rights. They do not deserve our sympathy," McCain continued. "But this isn't about who they are. It is about who we are."

In holding up that torch, McCain challenged his colleagues to stand up to the White House on the torture issue. "Under Article I, Section 8 of the U. S. Constitution, the Congress has the responsibility for making ... 'rules concerning captures on land and water.' Not the executive branch, not the courts, but Congress," he said.