"We Don't Torture Anyone, OK?"

The book *Impeach the President: The Case Against Bush and Cheney*, edited by Dennis Loo and Peter Phillips, is a compilation of essays by notable impeachment advocates including Greg Palast and Mark Crispin Miller.

In Chapter 9, "The Campaign for Unfettered Power," researcher and educator Barbara J. Bowley writes that Bush has issued an unprecedented number of "signing statements" as a way of setting himself above the law. In 2005, Bush attached a signing statement to the McCain amendment, a bill which would have prohibited torture of detainees.

The signing statement said Bush would interpret the anti-torture amendment "in a manner consistent with the constitutional authority of the president to supervise the unitary executive branch...and consistent with the constitutional limitations on judicial power." Or, as Bowley says, Bush was claiming "that neither the courts nor Congress had the constitutional authority to interfere with his prerogative to act on his own terms."

In Chapter 5, "Defending the Indefensible: Torture and the American Empire," Dennis Loo notes that while the U.S. has used torture in the past, (for example, in the slave trade) Bush and Cheney have taken steps toward making torture a more extensive, officially sanctioned practice.

The practice of "rendition," according to Loo, is "transporting prisoners to 'black sites' in places such as Uzbekistan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Romania and Poland for further 'interrogation.'"

Loo adds, "The Washington Post broke the story about rendition in 2005. After this revelation [Condoleeza] Rice faced a firestorm of criticism about this practice from Europeans during her tour there. According to a U.S. State Department February 2001 report, Uzbek police routinely are guilty of 'beating, often with blunt weapons, and asphyxiation with a gas mask.'"

According to Loo, "Human rights groups reported that Uzbek jail torture included boiling of body parts, electroshock to genitals and the use of pliers to pry off fingernails and toenails. Two prisoners were boiled to death, these groups reported. Despite the State Department's own report on torture, Rice and the Bush administration have nonetheless been flying prisoners -- some of whom are 'ghost' prisoners because their identity has been altogether hidden -- to places like Uzbekistan."

Loo says, "According to an April 4, 2006, Amnesty International investigation, the CIA has flown some thousand flights of this kind, with the number of rendition prisoners unknown...Rice's statements for the record on this practice were striking for their carefully worded character, as if she were trying to remain technically accurate and speaking for the sake of those who were looking only at the surface meaning, while leaving the door wide open to continue the torture that the European government leaders, military and intelligence officers *know full well* the U.S. is engaged in."

The above-mentioned book covers additional Bush-Cheney offenses. However, the administration's action regarding torture is one of the most compelling arguments for impeachment.