WASHINGTON, 24 July 2005 — The Bush administration this week threatened to veto a Senate bill for $442 billion in next year’s defense programs if it tries to regulate the Pentagon’s treatment of detainees or sets up a commission to investigate operations at US operated military prisons.
The Bush Administration, internationally criticized for the indefinite detention of enemy combatants at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba and policies that led to terrible abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, told lawmakers it did not want them legislating on the matter.
The move came after at least 10 Republican Senators called for legislation that would block the US military from engaging in “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment” of detainees, including using interrogation methods not authorized by a new Army field manual, nor by the Geneva Conventions.
In a statement, the White House said such amendments would “interfere with the protection of Americans from terrorism by diverting resources from the war.”
“If legislation is presented that would restrict the president’s authority to protect Americans effectively from terrorist attack and bring terrorists to justice,” the bill could be vetoed, the statement said.
Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain, who endured torture as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, said after meeting this week at the Capitol with Vice President Dick Cheney that he still intended to offer amendments next week “on the standard of treatment of prisoners.”
Cheney told McCain, and two other senior Republican members on the Senate Armed Services Committee, that legislating these issues would interfere with the President.
This marks the second time that Cheney met with Senate lawmakers to reign in what the White House views as a Republican rebellion.
Republican lawmakers have also made the White House unhappy by publicly expressing their dissatisfaction over the administration’s inability to find any senior military officials responsible for detainee abuse in Iraq and at the US military prison at Guantanamo, Cuba.
Armed Services Committee Chairman John Warner, R-Virginia, said the amendments intended to prevent further abuses in the wake of the scandal over sexual abuse and mistreatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison and harsh, degrading interrogations at Guantanamo.
Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Massachusetts, said the Pentagon’s own investigations into detainee abuses left “huge gaps... the military is reviewing itself, that’s not good enough.”
Pentagon “talking points” against the special detainee commission circulating around the Capitol said reforms were under way, and the Pentagon “has the matter well in hand. The department and the services are doing everything possible to address this challenge.”
Also, lawyers for the Defense Department have “refused to cooperate” with a federal judge’s order to release secret photographs and videotapes related to the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal, the New York Times reported yesterday.
The photos belong to Army Specialist Joseph Darby, the whistle-blower who made public the photographs of widespread prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, and who gave investigators computer disks that allegedly held thousands of photographs and videos of prisoners being abused, sexually humiliated and terrified by in-your-face snarling dogs.
A small number of these photos caused international furor toward the US military when released in Spring 2004.
Last June, a judge in the New York Federal District Court ordered the release of the additional photographs, said the NYT, as part of a Freedom of Information lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union to examine the extent of abuse at American-run prisons in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo.
But in a response sent last Thursday, a government attorney said that the government was withholding the photographs because they “could result in harm to individuals.”
