Official lie

This administration's policies are shameful and downright embarassing to right-minded citizens of this country.

"As a matter of U.S. policy," (Secretary of State Condoleezza) Rice said the United Nations Convention against Torture "extends to U.S. personnel wherever they are, whether they are in the U.S. or outside the U.S."

The U.N. treaty also prohibits treatment that doesn't meet the legal definition of torture, including many practices that human rights organizations say were used routinely at the U.S. military prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The Bush administration has previously said the ban on cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment did not apply to Americans working overseas. In practice, that meant CIA employees could use methods in overseas prisons that would not be allowed in the United States.

Human rights organizations and critics in Europe have called that a loophole for treatment almost indistinguishable from torture. Prisoners suspected of links to terrorism have been chained to the floors of their cells, denied sleep and led to believe they could be killed.

House and Senate negotiators are expected to include a ban on cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of foreign terrorism suspects in a final defense bill. The White House has threatened to veto any bill containing such a ban, but President Bush's national security adviser, Stephen Hadley, has been negotiating with its chief sponsor, Sen. John McCain (news, bio, voting record), R-Ariz., to find a compromise.

If Rice says U.S. policy is that the UN ban on torture extends to all U.S. personnel and George Bush and his mouthpieces all say "We do not torture," what exactly are Stephen Hadley and Dick Cheney doing trying to find a way to permit CIA personnel to torture prisoners?

Short answer: CIA personnel already are torturing prisoners, and Condi and the president and all the president's men (and women) are lying.

Long answer: They are treading lightly around the word "torture." They maintain that their treatment of prisoners doesn't fit the strict legal definition of the word "torture." But the UN ban, which the U.S. secretary of state says applies to all U.S. personnel defines torture as "any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions."

But Articles 2 and 3 of the ban read as follows:

Article 2
Each State Party shall take effective legislative, administrative, judicial or other measures to prevent acts of torture in any territory under its jurisdiction.

No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat or war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.

An order from a superior officer or a public authority may not be invoked as a justification of torture.

Article 3
No State Party shall expel, return ("refouler") or extradite a person to another State where there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of being subjected to torture.

Any of that ring a bell? Perhaps Condi meant that the UN ban applies to all U.S. personnel that the government will acknowledge.

Not that long ago we watched a president split hairs over the definition of the word "is."

Oh, to debate such innocuous language again.

In a few short years, we've gone from watching an administration debate the meaning of "is" and "sexual relations" in response to an illict blowjob to an administration debating the meaning of "torture" in response to cruel, degrading, inhuman treatment of prisoners being held at secret locations without being charged.

How far backward we've gone is awful and shameful and embarrassing.