Agreement that the issue won’t go away; let’s see how much teeth this group actually has. Meanwhile, McCain’s anti-torture amendment will be signed by Bush, apparently without compromise on the language or scope of the torture ban; what was negotiated however was the “right” of interrogators accused of torture to claim they thought they were “following orders.” So McCain gets a law barring the US from doing what North Vietnam did to him; but he allows the Nuremburg defense, tried by the Nazis who tortured hundreds of thousands and murdered millions. Don’t let the headlines fool you; this is a key concession, because it will help those who have been conducting torture since 2002 under the cover of Bush’s various torture memos. If prosecuted, their actual defense will literally be that they were following orders – the orders of the President of the United States.
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