What the...?
Torture is bad, right? It's a no-brainer. Our country should not be in the torture business. Full stop.
That's why I'm having a really hard time wrapping my head around this.
The Senate delivered a stern rebuke to the Bush administration Wednesday night, adding language banning U.S. torture of military prisoners to a $440 billion military spending bill in defiance of a White House threat to veto the whole bill if the anti-torture language was attached.
Okay, let me get this straight. Bush's advisors will recommend he veto a military spending bill... during wartime... just because there's language attached that bans torture?
Their measure would ban the use of "cruel, inhuman or degrading" treatment of any prisoner in the hands of the United States. It's a response to the revelations of torture by U.S. personnel of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, which roused worldwide disgust.
Yeah, I can see where banning cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of prisoners is a bad thing. God forbid we actually be better than the terrorists.
Last week the White House sent the Senate a "statement of administration policy" that declared strong opposition to the anti-torture language on the grounds that it would tie the president's hands in the war on terrorism. The statement said that if the anti-torture terms remained in the bill's final version, "the president's senior advisers would recommend that he veto the bill."
Oh, okay. We wouldn't want to tie the president's hands with any of that pesky moral high ground stuff. Two wrongs make a right, after all.
That is what Jesus said, isn't it?
posted by Bad Methodist @ 5:47 AM
2 comments
2 Comments:
Yes, isn't it odd that a good, upstanding Christian - one who says that God personally told him (audibly, I suppose) to go to Afghanistan and Iraq - has to be forced to make torture illegal?
XT
It's a move for separation from Bush, who is in a weak position, by Senate Republicans. They're tired of giving and giving money to a sinkhole.
You know, my reading of the New Testament showed me that to be a Christian means to renounce violence. Perhaps I'm wrong, but the Iraq War was and is an act of gratuitous violence (i.e. "shock and awe" for the young men of the middle east)--certainly unbecoming of even Christians who believe violence is sometimes necessary as a last resort. "Turn the other cheek."
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