Markey’s Extraordinary Extraordinary Rendition Bill
Rep. Edward J. Markey (D. — Mass.) is making a point of standing up to the Bush administration’s too-cozy relationship with torture. Here’s an op-ed piece he wrote for the Boston Globe: US must stop ‘outsourcing’ torture. And here’s a bunch of stuff from his web site: The torture plane must be grounded (etc.).
Jeanne of Body and Soul is all over this, naturally: The beast in US and Time bombs and torture bills. Another good post is from hilzoy at Obsidian Wings: Support a ban on extraordinary rendition.
The Markey bill will fail, no doubt, given the control that the Grand Ol’ Torture Party currently exercises over Congress. But this still is very much the right thing to do. The path back to power in this country for those with real moral values leads through this issue. Avoiding it (as Kerry largely did during the debates, and the campaign, presumably because market research told him it was going to be a loser with swing voters) is immoral. There are times when it is better to fight a losing battle than to back away from it. This is very much one of those times.
Frankly, madame, government torture is something up with which we should not put. Bush supporters like to make a big deal about their willingness to “defend America,” in contrast to those lily-livered liberals who would cave in to her enemies. But those who turn a blind eye toward Bush’s turning a blind eye toward torture are not defending America. They are abandoning her, caving in to her most insidious of enemies, dishonoring the blood spilled by generations of patriots. And they’re doing so without even a whimper of protest.
We will get the government we deserve. Those of you in the Bush camp who are not opposing him on this issue are not real Americans. You are Benedict Arnolds, one and all.
March 16th, 2005 at 8:42 am
I have been following this one closely. I really agree with the writer when he says,
“The practice of sending prisoners into the hands of known human rights violators mocks the core values that define who we are and threatens our own soldiers who risk their lives in combat and could face terrible consequences as prisoners of war.”
I think that statement pretty much sums up why this practice should be immediatley abolished. God help the soldier that gets captured by an insurgent that just spent a year in Uzbekistan prison.
March 16th, 2005 at 6:03 pm
Without further knowledge, agreed. Can anyone identify the date the bill was passed enabling extraordinary rendition, who wrote it, or introduced it, and a reference to locate the arguments used to justify passage. I have followed the links, and so many corresponding links that I might have overlooked it while getting lost, disoriented in the vast expanse of cyber-multi-link-space. The request is not politically motivated.
March 17th, 2005 at 1:02 pm
The rendition policies were never enabled by an act of Congress. The program was started in the mid-ninties by the CIA to aid in the early attempts to get bin Laden. It didn’t really get “out of hand” until after 9/11. There was a great article by Jane Mayer entitle “Outsourcing Torture” in The New Yorker that covers the history of it all. http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?050214fa_fact6