Teepen: Bush bucks own party on torture

The happy executioner of the Texas governorship is bidding to become as well the willing torturer of the U.S. presidency. It's some legacy George W. is working up.

The White House is threatening to veto a $440 billion military spending bill unless the Senate scraps its amendment limiting the military in prisoner interrogations to, in essence, the techniques outlined in the U.S. Army Field Manual on Intelligence Interrogation.

The legislation would give additional legal authority to what is already supposed to be standard practice — and is plainly also U.S. and international law.

This is not for once a markedly partisan issue. (Though if the provision makes it to the hyper-partisan House, that would probably change.) The Senate vote was 90-9, with 46 Republicans, including even Majority Leader Bill Frist, concurring. That is about as close to consensus as either congressional chamber ever gets, short of resolutions congratulating spelling bee winners.

Bush has kept the veto stamp in his desk drawer even as runaway spending has dragged the national budget into record deficit, so why get it out now? Presumably because he wants to be able to keep pretending in public that he is against torturing prisoners even as his administration practices it behind the scenes.

Bush has claimed, unconvincingly, that such restraining instruments as the Geneva Conventions don't apply in the war on terrorism but has said the United States would abide by them even so and would punish any personnel who lapse.

There was a time when, if you were willing to stretch, you could make yourself believe that Bush really didn't know what was going on at U.S. military prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan and at Guantanamo Bay. After all, here was a president who actually boasted that he never reads newspapers and instead gets all the information he need from aides — for which, read "sycophants."

But FBI, U.S. military and International Red Cross reports have made it inescapably plain that abuses have been numerous and often grotesque. The armed services' own leading legal officers have deplored inhuman treatment. The world knows, down to the serial numbers of the planes used in the program, that we have been "rendering" prisoners to nations that torture with glee.

Bush's attorney general and defense secretary have invented rationales that would excuse torture and have asserted the bizarre notion that the president, as commander in chief, is welcome to brush aside any law he wishes.

As for the accountability Bush promised, only a handful of lower-level personnel — acting without clear guidelines or leadership and often without proper training — have been seriously disciplined.

The military itself has been especially distressed by this spreading blot. American failure to abide by Geneva and other humane rules endangers U.S. military personnel when they are captured and questioned.

The Senate vote was led by Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., a former prisoner of war. It was supported by more than two dozen retired senior military officers, including Colin Powell and John Shalikashvili, two former chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The Senate provision simply bars "cruel, inhuman or degrading" treatment of prisoners. Through most of our history, that would have gone without saying.

Tom Teepen is a columnist for Cox Newspapers. He is based in Atlanta. E-mail: teepencolumn@coxnews.com.