Dick Cheney, the vice president of the USA, is asking Congress to approve legal language that would allow the CIA to commit acts of torture against foreigners held by the CIA in foreign prisons.

From the editorial in the Washington Post (Registration required. (Bugmenot is your friend.) Mirror)

It's not surprising that Mr. Cheney would be at the forefront of an attempt to ratify and legalize this shameful record. The vice president has been a prime mover behind the Bush administration's decision to violate the Geneva Conventions and the U.N. Convention Against Torture and to break with decades of past practice by the U.S. military. These decisions at the top have led to hundreds of documented cases of abuse, torture and homicide in Iraq and Afghanistan. Mr. Cheney's counsel, David S. Addington, was reportedly one of the principal authors of a legal memo justifying the torture of suspects. This summer Mr. Cheney told several Republican senators that President Bush would veto the annual defense spending bill if it contained language prohibiting the use of cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment by any U.S. personnel.

This government has for some time been sending prisoners to torture in foreign prisons, having them endure treatment as brutal as any Hussein ever doled out. In so doing, we have begun to mirror the morals of our enemy. Dick Cheney is trying to make these covert actions against prisoners legal, moving Americans out of the role of ostriches (or see-no-evil monkeys) and asking us look this travesty in the face and write it into law. Most certainly, this law is intended to protect Cheney and Rumsfeld and others in this regime and the military that has followed their directives from future liability as war criminals. If we as citizens agree to write this into law, their sins become ours, just like the sins of the Nazi's became a blight on the German populace, who gradually allowed brutality to be written into the law of their land.

Only those of weak character abandon their principles in the face of fear. Are we going to rationalize away our principles because we are now frightened of terrorists? Isn't fear the justifying motivation for torture in every regime that we condemn as evil? Our country cannot let our morals continue to slide. I support Senator John McCain to continue to ban the "cruel, inhuman and degrading" treatment of prisoners everywhere.  He has personal knowledge of this treatment. He also knows that if we do this to others, it will be done to our citizens for years to come.