Reply #10: many other aspects

[nofurylike]

http://www.metrotimes.com/editorial/story.asp?id=8660

Tortured logic
by News Hits staff
12/21/2005

-snip-

At issue is the so-called Graham-Levin-Kyl amendment to a key defense authorization bill that passed the House of Representatives on Monday. Primarily written by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), the amendment, as described in a New York Times article, would “enable the government to keep prisoners at Guantanamo Bay indefinitely on the basis of evidence obtained through coercive interrogations.”

Attorney Bill Goodman, legal director for the Center for Constitutional Rights, tells News Hits that coercive interrogation is “just a nice term for torture.”

Writing for the online publication Slate, senior editor Emily Bazelon described the potential ramifications of the amendment this way: “hen a Guantanamo detainee gets his moment in court, or the closest thing to it, to which he’s currently entitled, he can claim that he hasn’t fought against the United States, doesn’t belong to al-Qaida, and should be allowed to go home. And then the government lawyers on the other side can say, ‘Actually, you are an al-Qaida member. We think so because another guy said you were. We asked him about you right before we made him think he would suffocate if he didn’t say what we wanted to hear.’”

-snip-

Part of the twisted irony of all this is that another amendment to the same bill — this one authored by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) — outlaws the use of “cruel, inhuman, or degrading” treatment of detainees in American custody anywhere in the world.

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http://www.slate.com/id/2132572/

The Get-Out-of-Torture-Free Card
Why is Congress banning torture but allowing the use of torture testimony?
By Emily Bazelon
Posted Thursday, Dec. 15, 2005,

-snip-

But the Graham-Levin-Kyl amendment, which is part of the same defense bill as the McCain provision and is expected to pass along with it, contains a big, fat exception. The bill would allow torture testimony to be used to hold and to punish detainees. Last week, I criticized a version of Graham-Levin-Kyl passed by the Senate that would permit the use of this testimony when a Guantanamo detainee is charged with a crime and tried before a special military commission. That's bad. But in the intervening week the amendment has gotten worse. The version that came out of the House-Senate conference this week allows the use of torture testimony before combatant status review tribunals, which the Bush administration has set up to determine whether a detainee is an enemy combatant. Each detainee gets a hearing before a CSRT. If the detainee loses, he can be locked up at Guantanamo Bay without charges, indefinitely it seems. Graham-Levin-Kyl also would allow torture testimony before administrative review boards, which periodically recheck whether the detainee is, in fact, the enemy combatant that the government says he is.

-snip-

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under the McCain section, they can define torture with "good faith reliance on the advice of counsel" (quote from the amendment provided by Amnesty International).

arbitrarily.

put it all together.


peace