The White House bowed to international and congressional pressure on Thursday and abandoned its opposition to Senate legislation prohibiting the use of cruel, inhuman or degrading interrogation methods of detainees in US custody around the world.
President George Bush had threatened to veto the legislation, proposed by Senator John McCain, on the grounds that it tied his hands in the ”war on terror” but the White House agreed to accept the Bill after an overwhelming majority in the Republican-dominated House of Representatives backed the McCain amendment on Wednesday night.
”We’ve sent a message to the world that the United States is not like the terrorists,” Senator McCain said, sitting next to the president in the Oval Office on Thursday. ”This will help us enormously in winning the hearts and minds of the people throughout the world in winning the war on terror.”
Bush said the agreement will ”make it clear to the world that this government does not torture and that we adhere to the international convention of torture, whether it be here at home or abroad”.
The bipartisan front by the Senate and the House was one element in a formidable show of defiance by Congress over the White House’s conduct of the war on terror.
Republican senators also joined Democrats to demand facts about secret CIA prisons abroad, while moderate Republican senators threatened to block anti-terror legislation on the grounds that it infringed civil liberties.
The united stand reflected widespread concern among legislators that the administration’s counter-terrorism methods are damaging America’s standing in the world. It also represented an assertion of congressional power and a growing reluctance to leave the conduct of ”the war on terror” to the executive alone.
The White House accepted the McCain Bill almost unchanged from the form it had vehemently opposed for months, even threatening the first use of a Bush veto.
Vice-President Dick Cheney had lobbied for an exception to the Bill for CIA officials operating abroad.
Under the agreed draft, US personnel accused of violations could argue that a ”reasonable” person might have concluded they were following a lawful order.
The legislation, which forms part of a defence spending Bill, also stipulates that members of the US armed forces follow interrogation procedures laid down in the army field manual, removing discretionary power from local commanders.
Meanwhile, MPs from across the political spectrum in Britain on Thursday stepped up pressure on the government to provide information on its role in CIA ”torture flights”.
Andrew Tyrie, Conservative chairperson of the all-party group on extraordinary rendition, said the issue would not go away.
At a Commons press conference, with British Labour MP Lynne Jones, Liberal Democrat MP Evan Harris and Liberty director Shami Chakrabarti, Tyrie said: ”There is a real risk that the government may find themselves complicit by inaction. Turning a blind eye becomes something more than negligence and may be shown to be unlawful.”
In a letter to Jack Straw, the British Foreign Secretary, he demanded to know whether the government had asked the US administration how many CIA flights transporting detainees had passed through British airspace and whether it had sought permission for them. He also asked Straw whether he had checked flight records of the Ministry of Defence, air traffic control, and the records of private companies such as BAA, Infratil, and TBI Group, which run Glasgow, Prestwick and Luton airports.
Straw has said only that Foreign Office and Home Office records had been searched. The Home Office has already said it destroys records of transit flights. The MoD says its records could be supplied only at ”disproportionate cost”.
Jones said details of the flights were bound to be made public as those freed after being subjected to rendition spoke out.
Backstory
Thursday’s deal between the White House and Senator John McCain marked the end of long and bumpy road that began in Abu Ghraib last year.
A Pentagon report on gross abuse of detainees at the US-run military prison, and subsequent revelations of maltreatment and deaths in custody in Afghanistan, led to allegations that the White House had created a ”climate of abuse” by flouting the Geneva conventions. Bush repeatedly insisted ”we do not torture”, but unease spread to the Republican party.
In October Senator McCain, a victim of torture in Vietnam, introduced legislation banning abuse of detainees in US custody. Dick Cheney led the White House resistance, demanding an exception for CIA agents abroad. Thursday’s deal is a measure of his declining influence on Capitol Hill. – Guardian Unlimited Â