House votes to outlaw CIA waterboarding

House votes to outlaw CIA waterboarding

14 minutes ago

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Democratic-led House of Representatives voted on Thursday to outlaw harsh interrogation methods, such as simulated drowning, that the CIA has used against suspected terrorists.

On a 222-199 vote, the House approved a measure to require intelligence agents to comply with the Army Field Manual, which meets the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of war prisoners and prohibits torture.

The measure passed amid a congressional probe into the recent disclosure that the CIA destroyed videotapes of al Qaeda suspects undergoing waterboarding, a simulated drowning.

Many countries, U.S. lawmakers and human rights groups have accused the United States of torturing terror suspects since the September 11 attacks.

President George W. Bush says the United States does not torture but the administration will not disclose what interrogation methods are used.

update: Many of you have mentioned that torture is already illegal, and that there are laws against waterboarding in particular. And that's true. And, until this President, we never had a chief executive who wanted to blur those lines. But this President has been intent on defining "torture" differently, and his Administration claims that the CIA is not bound by the same statutes as the military. That was why Judge Mukasey's refusal to define waterboarding as torture worried me: that ambiguity seemed consistent with the Administration's views. So, what this legislation does is make it completely clear that all of our government is bound by the same restrictions as the military, period. It explicitly says that waterboarding is torture, and is therefore illegal. It closes a loophole that the Administration has been intent on exploiting.

We could argue until we're blue in the face on whether that loophole is real or not, but that won't stop anything. We need to assert the power of the legislative branch and make clear exactly what the law is, for this and all future Administrations. We need to do what we can to make it crystal clear what we stand for as a nation.

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update3: OK, to answer another recurring question: no, this doesn't immunize anyone or give legal cover to prior activities. This simply makes clear that the Army's guidelines governing the military's conduct also apply to every agency of the American government. Vice President Cheney tried to get the Republican Congress to create a special loophole for the CIA in 2005 that muddied the waters on what they could and couldn't do. It's that perceived loophole they are trying to exploit, as I mentioned earlier. We're bringing clarity to this issue, rather than allowing any bad behavior to fester in the shadows. But, just to be clear, this doesn't, as some people have asked, create any immunity for any actions that were illegal before. We're just shining a bright light on this behavior, drawing clear lines that even the Bush Administration or future Republican Administration (if there are any) will understand, and saying, "Our government will not torture. Ever."

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