Republicans Endorse Torture
Voting mostly along party lines, the United States House of Representatives failed to override President Bush’s veto of the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2008. President Bush objected to section 327:
(a) LIMITATION.—No individual in the custody or under the effective control of an element of the intelligence community or instrumentality thereof, regardless of nationality or physical location, shall be subject to any treatment or technique of interrogation not authorized by the United States Army Field Manual on Human Intelligence Collector Operations.
(b) INSTRUMENTALITY DEFINED.—In this section, the term ‘‘instrumentality’’, with respect to an element of the intelligence community, means a contractor or subcontractor at any tier of the element of the intelligence community.
The the United States Army Field Manual on Human Intelligence Collector Operations prohibits interrogation techniques like waterboarding.
Roscoe Bartlett (R-MD 6th) represents Hagerstown, where I lived in several years ago. The Seventh-day Adventist Congressman broke with his party and voted to override the veto. My current representative, Wayne Gilchrest (R-MD 1st) also broke with his party and voted to pass the measure, “Objections of the President Not Withstanding.”
Information about the Bill is available from the Library of Congress
