Shrill? No, Just Facing Facts

I've gotten a few e-mails calling me shrill for this post. Well, one of my two favorite heterodox liberals, Nat Hentoff (Marc Cooper is the other) in his Liberty Beat Column in The Village Voice makes much the same case:

As noted here before, these "extraordinary renditions," as they're known in the torture trade, have already been conducted secretly by the CIA. On October 6, 2004, Shaun Waterman of United Press International noted that "at present, the procedure is carried out in a covert, extra-legal fashion by CIA operatives in chartered Gulfstream jets . . .

"U.S. law [until now] explicitly prohibits the deportation or removal of people from the United States to countries . . . where there is a reasonable expectation they might be tortured . . . " (Emphasis added.)

While the House approved violating that rule of law, the Senate passed a 9-11 recommendations act without a torture provision. As of this writing, a House-Senate conference committee will decide whether torture stays in the final bill. If it does, America will tell the world that torture is a weapon we righteously use against terrorism.

There's a hero here - and he's not on the Republican side of the aisle:

In the House, the opposition leader against this official, brutal revision of what the president called our "values, "our soul," "our being" has been Edward Markey. Markey had previously introduced a bill, hardly noticed by the media, that would have forbidden any rendition of anybody under American control to countries that torture.

Now, Markey said on the floor of the House (October 7) during the debate on the torture sections of H.R. 10: "It's outrageous that these provisions have been snuck into the 9-11 bill behind closed doors when the 9-11 Commission specifically called for the United States to 'offer an example of moral leadership in the world, committed to treat people humanely, abide by the law . . . ' Nothing could be farther from the 9-11 Commission's intent."

It should also be noted that in addition to violating the international convention against torture, Bush's leader in the House broke our own law, section 2242 of the 1998 Foreign Affairs Reform and Restructuring Act, which says the policy of the United States is "not to expel, extradite, or otherwise effect the involuntary return of any person to a country in which there are substantial grounds for believing the person would be in danger of being subjected to torture, regardless of whether the person is physically present in the United States"—or had been captured by the CIA in another country.

So if you think I'm being shrill, don't blame me. I'm just calling them as I see them.