Al Qaida's Bill of Rights - Thank you Congress!

It's nice to know who's on your side during times of war. Will someone please tell me?

From Investors Business Daily:
Tying Our Hands
Posted 12/16/2005

Intelligence: Is torture ever justified? For weeks, Congress has agonized over the question, finally answering "no." But what message do the terrorists take from it?

It started with Abu Ghraib and those embarrassing photos that lowly U.S. soldiers took of captured Iraqis they had humiliated. Critics of the Iraq War gleefully pointed to Yankee perfidy.

Why, they said, these incidents — which didn't begin to compare with Saddam's rape rooms and wood chippers — weren't even equivalent to Baathist monstrosities. Somehow, because committed by soldiers wearing the U.S. Army uniform, they were worse.

There followed court-martials, sentences, a demotion of the general in charge, pious vows that such nastiness wouldn't happen again — and suspicions that the Pentagon's post-9-11 parameters for interrogation authorized the excesses. Had the U.S. broken the Geneva Conventions banning torture of captured enemies?

It wasn't the sort of question our intelligence agents, the Defense Department or the White House needed as they went about protecting us from attack. The administration answered with what it thought was finality: Outside of Abu Ghraib itself, in the wider world of counterterrorism, we were dealing with stateless enemies, none of them subject to Geneva restrictions.

But that didn't satisfy the critics, among them Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. He had experienced torture as a Navy pilot captured in Vietnam, and he didn't want our country reduced to that level. So he introduced an amendment to ban such practices.

The White House balked. Does the definition of "torture" include, say, "waterboarding," in which a captive is made to think he's being drowned? And what about that unthinkable hypothetical, the one in which you nab a terrorist thought to have detailed knowledge of a pending attack?
Editorialists at The New York Times and elsewhere who screamed for passage of McCain's amendment danced around that existential issue. But last week President Bush, perhaps in the Yuletide spirit, perhaps wilting before Euro-criticism, but no doubt yielding to mounting congressional sentiment, assented to the McCain amendment, which passed both houses overwhelmingly.

Plenty of parliamentary maneuvering allowed that to happen. Congressman Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., inserted language providing that the amendment wouldn't hurt intelligence-gathering. The White House insisted it would continue to define "torture" in any way it plausibly could. Presumably, waterboarding is permitted.

We suppose we're happy Congress and the administration have sent to the world a message consistent with our own prohibition of "cruel and unusual punishment."

But we wonder what an al-Qaida operative, plotting another attack on a U.S. facility, might think:
"If they catch me beforehand, they might hold my head under water. But they'll pull it out just in time. OK, I'll live, and I won't be sent to a wood chipper. The virgins can wait."

Nice job, Congress.