Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2008 Veto Message from the President of the United States
INTELLIGENCE AUTHORIZATION ACT FOR FISCAL YEAR 2008 VETO MESSAGE FROM THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES -- (House of Representatives - March 11, 2008)
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Mr. DOGGETT. I thank the gentleman for yielding.
Mr. Speaker, with this veto, President Bush has once again failed to safeguard our families.
And what is this ``waterboarding'' that the President so readily embraces? It sounds a little like a cousin of skateboarding or snowboarding. But, in fact, it is a new name for an old water torture in which a human being is drowned. The drowning is controlled to force a response, but waterboarding is simply a euphemism for torture by drowning.
Now, President Bush is not the first Texan to think of this and to believe that horrific wrongs can justify drowning of the culprit. An earlier Texas waterboarder is not in the White House; he was sent to the Big House. A Texas judge said that this waterboarding Texas sheriff put law enforcement ``in the hands of a bunch of thugs'' that would ``embarrass a dictator.'' The sheriff was sentenced to 10 years. That judge was right, and this administration is so very wrong.
America seems to have been sentenced to 8 years of Dick Cheney, who claims that such water torture is a ``no brainer.'' ``No brainer''--that sounds like a good way to describe how so many of this Administration's policies have been made.
Torture is no proper tool in the arsenal of democracy. Torture is foreign to our values, foreign to our history, foreign to our religions, foreign to our laws, and it is foreign to our international commitments. There can be no compromise, no middle ground. We must have zero tolerance for torture.
If we abandon our American values, we lose who we are. We lose our identity. We lose our pride as the greatest Nation in the world. And if the Administration and its apologists continue forcing America to abandon the rule of law and our long commitment to human dignity, we will lose the war.
The use of torture, which President Bush's veto endorses, is not only un-American; it is ineffective. That is one reason why the Army Field Manual prohibits its use even when our military is in harm's way. As General David Petraeus, our commander in Iraq, wrote to his troops last year: ``Beyond the basic fact that such actions are illegal, history shows that they also are frequently neither useful nor necessary.''
I say follow our generals, not the Cheney ideologues, not the apologists. Override this veto.
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