‘In an extraordinary declaration of the brutality of American foreign policy, the Bush administration denounced a Senate vote to bar the use of torture against prisoners held by the US military.

Responding to the passage of an amendment to a Pentagon spending bill – approved by an overwhelming 90-9 vote Wednesday, the White House said the proposal would “restrict the president’s authority to protect Americans effectively from terrorist attack & bring terrorists to justice.

"This is the first time they've said explicitly that the intelligence community should be allowed to treat prisoners inhumanely." said Tom Malinowski, the Washington advocacy director for Human Rights Watch.  

"In the past, they've only said that the law does not forbid inhumane treatment." Now, he said, the administration is saying more concretely that it cannot be forbidden. 

Cheney Plan Exempts CIA From Bill Barring Abuse of Detainees

‘At least 21 detainees who died while being held in U.S. custody in Iraq and Afghanistan were killed, many during or after interrogations, according to an analysis of Defense Department data by the American Civil Liberties Union.

The analysis, released Monday, looked at 44 deaths described in records obtained by the ACLU. Of those, the group characterized 21 as homicides, and said at least eight resulted from abusive techniques by military or intelligence officers, such as strangulation or "blunt force injuries," as noted in the autopsy reports. 

The 44 deaths represent a partial group of the total number of prisoners who have died in U.S. custody overseas; more than 100 have died of natural and violent causes.’ 

ACLU Reports 21 Homicides In US Custody

‘After the Sept. 11 attacks, the CIA was eager to whisk captured terrorists off to secret locations around the world where its operatives could interrogate them out of the reach of the U.S. legal system and human-rights organizations.  

But four years later, with about three dozen of al-Qaeda's most hard-core agents in CIA custody, America's new spy chief seems less enthusiastic about the leeway his operatives have had.  

At a secret briefing for U.S. Senators on Oct. 26, a senior U.S. intelligence official tells TIME, Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte was pointedly neutral on Vice President Dick Cheney's Capitol Hill lobbying to have the CIA exempted from legislation banning mistreatment of detainees. "It's above my pay grade," the spymaster said, then artfully dodged another question about whether the harsher interrogation tactics Cheney wants the agency to be free to use actually produce valuable intelligence.’ 

Outing Secret Jails

"We do not torture," said our pitifully 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: a 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 amidst the most magnificent ideals of freedom and justice, the greatest political heritage ever given to any people anywhere. 

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

Shame. Shame. Shame.’  

Some Kind of 'Manly'

Medal of Torture