New Group to Fight Torture; Candidates Urged to Sign Anti-Torture Pledge
NEW YORK - A coalition of civil rights groups launched a campaign on Tuesday urging presidential candidates to sign an “American Freedom Pledge” rejecting torture, detention without trial and warrantless wire-tapping.
Around 130,000 people have signed a petition of the American Freedom Campaign, which bills itself as a bipartisan effort to defend democracy from “abuses of power” under U.S. President George W. Bush.
“By trading our liberties for a false sense of security, the president has granted himself the power of tyrants,” said Vincent Warren, executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, a legal group that has frequently challenged Bush’s counterterrorism policies in court.
The White House has denied accusations that it condones torture and repudiated internal administration documents recommending a definition of torture that critics called extreme.
Some Republican presidential candidates have called for depriving terrorism suspects of access to lawyers or endorsed interrogation techniques such as simulated drowning, or “waterboarding.”
The campaign is backed by global watchdog Human Rights Watch, author Naomi Wolf and MoveOn.org, an Internet-based activist group that has campaigned against the Iraq war and on issues such as health care.
Moveon.org co-founder Wes Boyd said the campaign aimed to show politicians, especially Democrats, that there was public support for principles of civil liberties. “Democrats often fall victim to the charge that they’re not security-focused, that they’re soft. We believe that’s nonsense,” he said.
Boyd likened the campaign to a movement launched earlier this year by the “American Freedom Agenda,” a conservative legal group which promotes limits to government power.
“It is going on both sides of the aisle,” Boyd told Reuters. He also pointed to Republican candidate Ron Paul, a libertarian longshot who has been outspoken in criticizing Bush and called for closing the Guantanamo Bay military prison.
Organizers hope to attract hundreds of thousands to sign the pledge. They will use it to exert pressure in Congress, for example, in a bid to reassert the right for detainees held without trial at Guantanamo to challenge their detention in court.
The online pledge (http://www.americanfreedomcampaign.org) reads: “We are Americans, and in our America we do not torture, we do not imprison people without charge or legal remedy, we do not tap people’s phones and e-mails without a court order, and above all we do not give any president unchecked power.”
“I pledge to fight to protect and defend the Constitution from assault by any president.”
Freedom Campaign coalition co-founder David Fenton said letters inviting candidates to sign the pledge had only just been sent out so no responses had yet been received.
© Reuters 2007
Every attempt to curb TYRANNY is a good one.
Sign up!!!
Nancy Pelosi had a provision requiring Bush to consult Congress before attacking Iran removed from a bill a few months ago. Lots of luck with getting these hacks in our government to honor a non-binding anti-torture petition.
Using campaign spending limits to get America better politicians is the only way to solve America’s problems enough. And, anyone who thinks “clean money” public financing of our campaigns will get us good-enough politicians is sadly mistaken.
Some how enough American citizens have to get together to bring down all the elected officials who are now failing the country.
Unfortunately, we will have to wait until and IF, enough citizens stand up and demand a change. Only when it is written clearly on Congress’ foreheads will they comprehend and take action. Other wise, everything is done for special interests groups, of which they themselves as Numero uno.
My God, it must be the saddest day in American, do we really need a partition to state that TORTURE is wrong. The free people have lost. The GREED, POWER, FEAR coupled with the sociopathic behavior of the Republican Party rules the United States of America. Do not normal people realize torturing another human being is just wrong?
Perhaps Mike Vick was not conducting dog-fighting activities but he felt the dogs might be connected to terrorist then that would be OK and he would be an American HERO. When are the American people going to WAKE-UP? The Bush administration/Republican congress needs to be held responsible for the crimes they have committed. Additionally, the gutless, soulless, a moral, lackeys carrying out the atrocities need to be held accountable for their crimes on humanity, period.
TORTURE?
Unbelievable.
Here’s what I know for certain about torture:
1. Everybody breaks under torture. EVERYBODY.
2. Any information gained via torture is COMPLETELY UNRELIABLE.
Press the right button and your “subject” will confess to blowing up the Hindenburg.
This, of course, is completely aside from the fact that torture is fundamentally reprehensible.
Put me in the whitehouse and I’ll appoint a special investigation/prosecution team to scour the place clean and I mean anybody who practices torture, with or without “orders” to do so, is going to do hard time. REAL hard time. And that INCLUDES anyone who gave the order, even if he didn’t personally get his hands bloody.
Is being a sociopath now a REQUIREMENT for a government position?
SJ
www.spartacusjones.com
Spartacus -
I wouldn’t be quite so certain on either point, if I were you.
The Roman Catholic church has canonized countless torture victims who did not renounce their faith, and who instead accepted martyrdom. What about Mel Gibson in Braveheart, or Mel Gibson as Jesus for that matter? What about the Salem witch suspects who drown or were pressed to death rather than falsely confessing to visitations from the Devil?
What’s particularly counter-productive about Bush’s torture policies is that they play right into the religious zealotry of wannabe suicide bomber jihadiis craving for machisimo martyrdom. Dumb, dumb, dumb.
The real problem with using torture is that the overwhelming majority - MOST - torture victims do break down and recant, confess, recant again, and confess again. You wind up (like you say) with inherently tainted, inherently unreliable conflicting statements that have only propaganda value and no substantive worth.
That’s why I find it so bizarre that the 911 Commission relied so heavily upon Khalid Sheik Mohammed’s various confessions following his water boarding sessions, and Bush continues to trumpet the end product of his super classified, enhanced interrogation techniques as having been instrumental in keeping us all safe from various planned terrorist attacks that were valiantly nipped in the bud. Just last week, the media uncritically accepted as true a linkage between Osama bin Laden’s group and the group styling itself as Al Qaeda in Iraq, this dubious, politically self-serving affiliation attributed to highly reliable intelligence information obtained from detainees’ interrogations.
Garbage in, almost invariably garbage back out.
The “almost” qualification is important, however.
In a streamlined police state torture regime, the inquisitors interrogate first using ordinary (nonviolent) interview techniques. If the good cops get a confession, then the bad cops take over and see if any of the details change, or the list of named coconspirators expands, when torture is applied.
No variance, and the state has confirmed it’s “reliable intelligence.” Get a variance, and now it’s anybody’s guess where reality lies.
Of course, every candidate under serious consideration to hold top executive law enforcement or intelligence gathering power should sign a pledge not to engage in torture, and vow to rely upon police professionalism instead. If the federal government wants to seriously address the issue of international terrorism by non-state actors, then we should focus on and seriously address the deficiencies of Interpol and the mish mash of current extradition law.
That such a litmus test promise - swearing off torture as a policy option - is now even being stirred into the partisan winnowing process is a sad commentary on just how deep into depravity the nation has truly sunk, courtesy of a rogue regime which initially campaigned for voter approval with the proclaimed goal of restoring Christian moral clarity to the Oval office.
Bill from Saginaw