Bush Vetoes Torture-Banning Bill
President Bush said Saturday he vetoed legislation that would ban the CIA from using harsh interrogation methods such as waterboarding to break suspected terrorists because it would end practices that have prevented attacks.
“The bill Congress sent me would take away one of the most valuable tools in the war on terror,” Bush said in his weekly radio address taped for broadcast Saturday. “So today I vetoed it,” Bush said. The bill he rejected provides guidelines for intelligence activities for the year and has the interrogation requirement as one provision. It cleared the House in December and the Senate last month.
“This is no time for Congress to abandon practices that have a proven track record of keeping America safe,” the president said.
Supporters of the legislation say it would preserve the United States‘ ability to collect critical intelligence while also providing a much-needed boost to country’s moral standing abroad.
“Torture is a black mark against the United States,” said Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-California. “We will not stop until [the ban] becomes law.”
The bill would limit CIA interrogators to the 19 techniques allowed for use by military questioners. The Army field manual in 2006 banned using methods such as waterboarding or sensory deprivation on uncooperative prisoners.
Bush said the CIA must retain use of “specialized interrogation procedures” that the military doesn’t need. The military methods are designed for questioning “lawful combatants captured on the battlefield,” while intelligence professionals are dealing with “hardened terrorists” who have been trained to resist the techniques in the Army manual, the president said.
“We created alternative procedures to question the most dangerous al Qaeda operatives, particularly those who might have knowledge of attacks planned on our homeland,” Bush said. “If we were to shut down this program and restrict the CIA to methods in the field manual, we could lose vital information from senior al Qaeda terrorists, and that could cost American lives.”
The legislation’s backers say the military’s approved methods are sufficient to any need.
Source: CNN.
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