US Diary: This nation of torturers

1. Heading Toward the 'Dark Side' -- by Elisa Massimino

Horrified U.S. allies are investigating secret CIA prisons that have been operating on European Union territory. Dick Cheney is being called "vice president for torture," and cartoons depict him wielding thumbscrews and the rack. In political commentaries, the Bush administration is skewered for hypocrisy as it insists that "we don't torture" while fighting to preserve its right to do so.

Still, the administration will not yield on its demand that U.S. intelligence officials must be given the right to use cruel, inhumane and degrading methods on terrorism suspects.

The administration must believe something vital is at stake to withstand the public reprobation — and political damage — its position is creating. At bottom, this is about executive power: The administration insists that in fighting the "global war on terror," it can accept no limits on the powers of the commander in chief.

In staking out such a position on torture, President Bush has moved far from the mainstream of his own party. On one side are Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona and 89 other senators, a majority of the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, former Joint Chiefs chairmen Colin Powell and John Shalikashvili and more than two dozen other retired senior military leaders. All insist that the moral standing of the United States and the safety of its troops demand an unequivocal rejection of torture and other abuse of prisoners in our custody. On the other side is the White House.

The president says all prisoners will be treated humanely. But the world is not reassured. Maybe that's because his administration is fighting McCain's anti-torture legislation tooth and nail, even threatening to veto the $453-billion defense appropriations bill that would fund combat operations in Iraq, just to kill McCain's amendment. The president's actions speak louder than his words.

Why is the White House opposing McCain's amendment with such vehemence? For months, administration officials have insisted that, in some cases, interrogators need cruel tactics to elicit vital information that would protect American lives. They assert that the government has obtained such information using these techniques, but they have never come forward with details to substantiate the claim.

In contrast, numerous CIA, FBI and military interrogators insist that they neither want nor need such authority. Even John Negroponte, director of national intelligence, recently declined to support the vice president's claim that harsh tactics produce actionable intelligence.

As one veteran interrogator said, "The only thing torture guarantees is pain — and sometimes death." Of the more than 80 deaths of detainees in U.S. custody, the Pentagon has classified 27 as criminal homicides. At least seven of those people were tortured to death. And dead men don't talk. So if cruelty and abuse are not the key to unlocking the secrets enemy prisoners hold, why the pitched battle against McCain?

The answer is executive power. Since 9/11, the administration has claimed sweeping authority for the president to fight terrorism, and has vigorously opposed any challenge by either Congress or the courts to the powers of the commander in chief in wartime. The McCain fight is the latest chapter in this four-year struggle, which tests the fundamental principle of separation of powers. A victory for the McCain amendment will help reaffirm an essential part of our constitutional system — securing checks and balances over the executive branch.

As passage of the McCain amendment appears more likely, the White House is now lobbying to shield from liability CIA agents who may have already abused prisoners in interrogation This concern for covert operatives is in sharp contrast to the long prison terms low-ranking soldiers are now serving for similar abuses. But these soldiers, whose actions are governed by military law, were not given advance approval to engage in the abuse. The CIA apparently was.

In its war on terror, the administration has sought to portray certain people as somehow beneath the law and therefore unworthy of humane treatment. Now Congress is finally taking a closer look at the administration's claim that some are above the law. Let's hope Congress holds its ground. Nothing less than the country's founding principles are at stake.

Time is running out for the torture lobby. The question, as McCain puts it, of "who we are" will likely be decided in the coming weeks. Are we a people who reject the inhumanity depicted in the Abu Ghraib photos and many more serious cases of abuse that cameras didn't capture? Or are we — as Cheney says we must be — willing to go to the "dark side" to fight terrorism?

The question is a momentous one. Our answer will not only define the national character for years to come but will affect — in ways we may not yet fully understand — our ability to defeat the terrorist enemy who has precipitated this moral crisis.

(Elisa Massimino is Washington director of Human Rights First.)


2. Torture: Spare Me The Tough Talk -- by Molly Ivins

I can't get over this feeling of unreality, that I am actually sitting here writing about our country having a gulag of secret prisons in which it tortures people. I have loved America all my life, even though I have often disagreed with the government. But this seems to me so preposterous, so monstrous.

Maybe I should try to get a grip -- after all, it's just this one administration that I had more cause than most to realize was full of inadequate people going in. And even at that, it seems to be mostly Vice President Cheney. And after all, we were badly frightened by 9/11, which was a horrible event. ''Only'' nine senators voted against the prohibition of ''cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment of persons under custody or control the United States.'' Nine out of 100. Should we be proud? Should we cry?

''We do not torture,'' said our inarticulate president, straining through emphasis and repetition to erase the obvious.

A string of prisons in Eastern Europe in which suspects are held and tortured indefinitely, without trial, without lawyers, without the right to confront their accusers, without knowing the evidence or the charges against them, if any. Forever. It's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Another secret prison in the midst of a military camp on an island run by an infamous dictator. Prisoner without a name, cell without a number.

Who are we? What have we become? The shining city on a hill, the beacon and bastion of refuge and freedom, a country born amid the most magnificent ideals of freedom and justice, the greatest political heritage ever given to any people anywhere.

I am baffled by these ''arguments'': But we're talking about really awful people, cries the harassed press secretary. People like X and Y and Z (after a time, one forgets all the names of the No. 2's after bin Laden we have captured). The SS and the Gestapo and the NKVD weren't all that nice, either.

Then I hear the familiar tinniness of the fake machismo I know so well from George W. Bush and all the other frat boys who never went to Vietnam and never got over the guilt.

''Sometimes you gotta play rough,'' said Dick Cheney. No kidding? Why don't you tell that to John McCain?

I have known George W. Bush since we were both in high school -- we have dozens of mutual friends. I have written two books about him and so have interviewed many dozens more who know him well in one way or another. Spare me the tough talk. He didn't play football -- he was a cheerleader. ''He is really competitive,'' said one friend. ``You wouldn't believe how tough he is on a tennis court!''

If you are dead to all sense of morality, let us still reason together on the famous American common ground of practicality. Torture does not work. It is not productive. It does not yield important, timely information. That is in the movies. This is reality.

Why did we bother to beat the Soviet Union if we were just going to become it? Shame. Shame. Shame.