Yes, just when you thought we had reached bottom, well, the bottom falls out. Andrew Sullivan, still manfully pursuing the torture scene, has more bad news. Obama’s found yet another way to cave for the CIA!
“The Obama administration is actually now debating whether the legal ban on torture by the CIA in black sites and brigs and gulags outside this country’s borders should be explicitly endorsed by the administration in its looming presentation before the UN’s Committee Against Torture (which might well be an interesting session, given the administration’s consistent refusal to enforce the Geneva Conventions).”
It’s clear that the CIA has never forgiven the president for banning torture, an act that contained the unforgivable sin of implicitly acknowledging that torture existed. The CIA, you see, doesn’t like to think bad thoughts. They bring you down, make you self conscious, when all you want to do is have fun.
Sullivan links to an article by Charlie Savage in the New York Times, reporting on intra-administration debate as to whether the Obama Administration should be as bad as the Bush Administration—whether the U.S. should explicitly affirm or repudiate the Bush Administration’s tortured interpretation of the United Nations Convention Against Torture, signed by the U.S., as forbidding U.S. government officials from engaging in “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment” anywhere in the world or only, and conveniently, within the U.S. itself.
As Sullivan notes, “we have a true test of what this president is made of, as the administration preps for its first appearance before the UN Committee. Is this president serious about torture? Or is he a pawn, like so many before him, of a rogue agency that is accountable to no one?” Know hope or no hope? Man or pig, or pig or man? At this point, it’s almost impossible to say which is which.
