Bill Nelson for torture

I went to the Hakmiyah prison. I can only describe it as a hellhole. I wanted to go there because of the cell that has the initials carved into the wall "MSS", which is the same as Michael Scott Speicher. We have no proof that that was the case. I observed the torture chamber and the refrigerated containers outside where they would put the corpses. And it all the more underscored the brutality of this regime. -- Sen. Bill Nelson, July 9, 2003

Captain Speicher was shot down during the first Gulf War and was the only American soldier for whom there was no account. No Senator worked harder to find out what happened to Speicher than Nelson. This, of course, is a good thing.

As the photo above shows, Sen. Nelson found what he believes is a room in which Speicher may have been tortured:

At a press conference in Kuwait City late Monday, Nelson said he visited the "hell-hole prison cell," as well as a torture chamber in the prison.

"In the basement, we saw the place where the torture took place. We saw where the chair that the prisoners would be strapped into was ripped from the concrete floor. We saw the wires and the holes that the wires came out for the electrical shocks," he said.

So naturally, one would expect any Senator who has seen first-hand the "brutality" of a government that condones torture to use his vote to ensure his own government never went down that dark road.

You'd be wrong. From today's NY Times:

WASHINGTON, May 31 — The Senate Intelligence Committee on Thursday questioned the continuing value of the Central Intelligence Agency’s secret interrogation program for terrorism suspects, suggesting that international condemnation and the obstacles it has created to criminal prosecution may outweigh its worth in gathering information.

The committee rejected by one vote a Democratic proposal that would essentially have cut money for the program by banning harsh interrogation techniques except in dire emergencies, a committee report revealed.

[...]

But the most novel element of the report is the assessment of the C.I.A. detention program, which the committee has rarely discussed in public. While only the chairman and the vice chairman were briefed on the program during the first five years after it was created following the 2001 terrorist attacks, all committee members have now been briefed for the first time, the report said.

The report acknowledged that the secret detention program “has led to the identification of terrorists and the disruption of terrorist plots.” But it says that achievement must now “be weighed against both the complications it causes to any ultimate prosecution of these terrorists, and the damage the program does to the image of the United States abroad.”

[...]

But the committee stopped short of using its budget authority to shut down the program. In a closed session on May 23, two Democrats, Senators Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island and Dianne Feinstein of California, proposed barring spending on interrogation techniques that go beyond the Army Field Manual, which bans physical pressure or pain. Under their proposal, the only exception would have been when the president determined “that an individual has information about a specific and imminent threat.”

The amendment failed when Senator Bill Nelson, Democrat of Florida, joined all the Republicans in voting no.

The loophole in this proposed amendment is already big enough for Bush to waterboard somebody through. But that wasn't good enough for Nelson, who was also one of the 12 Democrats who voted for Bush's torture bill, eliminating habeas corpus last September.

What a disgrace.

Oh, by the way, Sen. Whitehouse, once again, demonstrates that he is the rock star of the 2006 elections. If only there were 99 more like him.

Whitehouse on FISA

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) has, so far, been the most pleasant surprise to DB since the November 2006 elections.

First, he had the most impressive moment of the day during the last hearing with Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, when he pulled out some staggering charts to highlight the connections between the White House and the Department of Justice. (Dahlia Lithwick has the chart here.)

And again yesterday, at a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing, Sen. Whitehouse laid out the case against expanding Bush's intelligence gathering authority with total clarity. Here are his comments in total:

We'll talk more about this, obviously, in the closed session, but I wanted to make a couple of points. And before I do, Director, let me say that I'm going to be speaking rather generally. As between you and I, I believe you to be an honorable and trustworthy man. I think you are here with a view to be professional. That is your motivation. You are not an ideologue or a partisan and your desire is to repair the intelligence function of the United States and I applaud you for that.

But that said, you are still asking for substantial changes in your authority. As an aside, I think the new technologies that have emerged do suggest some adjustment to FISA. It may be over- or under-inclusive in some areas, but as we look through the lens of the past, in terms of evaluating how much we can trust you with, institutionally. You know, these are tough times. As you said, we had FISA... the reason we have FISA in the first place is because of past abuses.

We've just found out about the litany of national security letter abuses within the Department of Justice.

The Attorney General has thoroughly and utterly lost my confidence. And at this stage, any element of the FISA legislation that depends on the Attorney General will need some other backstop in order to have my confidence.

We are coming out of this Article II regime the TSP program of warrantless wiretapping, and to this day, we have never been provided the presidential authorizations that cleared that program to go, or the Attorney General-Department of Justice opinions that declared it to be lawful.

Now, if this program is truly concluded, the TSP program, and if this is the new day, where everything is to be under FISA, I can't imagine for the life of me why those documents, that pertain to a past and closed program, should not be made available to the Committee and to us.

And so to me, it is very concerning, as we take these next steps, for you to be saying impliedly "Trust us. We need the authority. We'll use it well," when we're coming off the record of the national security letters. We're coming off terrible damage done to the Department of Justice by this Attorney General. We're coming off a continuing stonewall from the White House on documents that I cannot, for the life of me, imagine merit confidentiality at this stage.

And in the context of all of that... You've got some uphill sledding with me.

And I want to work with you and I want to do this, but it would be a big step in the right direction in terms of building the trust

Mr. Potenza, I heard you just talk about how important it was, to the extent we've been disclosed... these opinions... that there was that transparency... We've been talking a lot about transparency and all that kind of stuff.

Where's the transparency as to the presidential authorizations for this closed program. Where's the transparency as to the Attorney General's opinion as to this closed program? That's a pretty big "We're not going to tell you" in this new atmosphere of trust we're trying to build.