opinion

Other voices: End American use of torture

The Senate on Tuesday overwhelmingly voted to ban the U.S. from ever again subjecting prisoners to waterboarding, “rectal feeding” and other brutal interrogation practices widely condemned as torture.

The vote split the chamber’s White House hopefuls. Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Rand Paul (R-Ky.) voted in support of the bill, while Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), another 2016 candidate, voted against it. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) was not in attendance but is on record opposing the ban.

from The Arizona Republic

When Senate Democrats released their 525-page report summary in December on the CIA’s use of torture during interrogations, critics accused the Dems of using their final days in the Senate majority to take partisan shots at the spy agency.

When the then-chairman of the Senate select committee on intelligence, Dianne Feinstein, said the four-year investigation revealed a “stain on our values and our history,” many of those same critics said Feinstein was seeking vengeance against an agency with which she often had clashed.

But when Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona spoke almost those same words — using torture, he said, “stained our national honor, did much harm and little good” — the critics had little left to say.

No one in Congress is more of an authority on the use of brutality to extract information from a helpless prisoner than John McCain.

If the former prisoner of war of the North Vietnamese judges the CIA’s actions to be both inhumane and counterproductive, then they simply are.

— Read full editorial

from the Los Angeles Times

It might seem obvious that all of these methods amount to “cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment.” But as lawyers in the Bush administration demonstrated, general definitions of torture can be creatively construed to justify horrific abuses. It’s vital that prohibitions of torture be both general and specific.

In addition to codifying Obama’s order, the amendment proposed by Feinstein and McCain would require that the manual be periodically reviewed to ensure that its provisions reflect U.S. legal obligations and “evidence-based best practices” for interrogations that don’t involve the use or threat of force. Revisions would be made public. Finally, the bill requires all agencies of government to provide the International Red Cross with access to detainees in their custody.

— Read full editorial