"Too vague." The debate began in June with a ruling of the Supreme Court, when Osama bin Laden's former driver, Ahmed Hamdan, appealed for his right to a normal trial. The Court ruled that the Geneva Conventions apply to all detainees, including "enemy combatants." The nation's top judges gave Bush only one exit door if he wanted to continue his "secret program": a vote from Congress. Hence the need for new legislation.

For the last ten days, a battle has erupted between the President and three rebel Republican senators, including John McCain, a Vietnam War veteran who underwent torture there. They opposed the White House's new definition of the Article 3 of the 1949 Geneva Conventions, which is considered to be "too vague." The article forbids "cruel treatment and torture," and "outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment RealVideo.

According to the version of the compromise released to the press, it is no longer a question of modifying Article 3. However, the plan considers that the Executive Branch has the latitude to determine if the treatment meted out to terrorist suspects constitutes a crime, except in regard to cases of "serious infringement."

Bush could therefore "interpret" the Conventions, but his interpretations, which will have the force of law, will have to be published. The compromise offers a list of "serious violations" over which the President would have no influence: these include "torture" and "serious physical and mental distress"; the White House insisted on the use of the word "grave" rather than "serious." The list doesn't forbid any specific techniques of interrogation.

And under this compromise, the American law on war crimes, which has hitherto supported the punishments called for by the Conventions (the United States is one of few countries to do so) would be amended to sanction only "grave violations" to the Swiss Convention. CIA agents who have been concerned about being hauled into court by detainees can breathe a sigh of relief.

Rights of defense. The negotiations, conducted between the Congress and the White House at the highest levels, were equally concerned about the right to a defense for terror suspects. In contrast to the wishes of the administration, they will have access to classified evidence against them, although in a slightly impaired form. "In effect" the Washington Post railed in its editorial, " the agreement means that U.S. violations of international human rights law can continue as long as Mr. Bush is president, with Congress's tacit assent".

"Surrounded by the smell of the almond and olive trees," as it says in the hotel advertisement, they prepared for their next mission in the war against terror. On the following day their Boeing 737 took off from Mallorca and landed in Macedonian Skopje, where the CIA group took the kidnapped German-Lebanese, Khaled el-Masri. As he recalled, the Americans flogged him before putting him into their aircraft. Later they threw the innocent man into a dungeon in Afghanistan where he was cross-examined for months because of his alleged ties to al-Qaeda.

The public prosecutor's office in Munich, which has been searching for the kidnappers for two years, now possesses a list of the presumed culprits. Spanish authorities sent the names in answer to an official request by Munich authorities. The kidnapping of el-Masri may well have been part of an anti-terror operation by the world's most powerful spy agency, but nevertheless, the Spanish police found it astonishingly easy to trace the Americans. The CIA used, among other things, the same aircraft again and again to transport its secret prisoners, including a Boeing with the identification number N313P, which had been sighted at many of the world's airports. It had also landed remarkably often on Mallorca. Public pressure encouraged the Mallorca authorities to pursue the clues left by the CIA.

WHY NOT FLY DIRECTLY TO MALLORCA?

Spanish officials quickly established that after landing their suspicious aircraft, the Americans checked into hotels as though they were normal tourists, where they, like every guest, submitted their passports, with photos. As on other occasions, the Boeing flight in January 2004 corresponded to entries in the guest book of a hotel near the airport: The Americans stayed in the Marriott Son Antem for one night, with names such as, Kirk James Bird, James Fairing or Patricia O'Riley. Later, on January 26, the same Boeing again landed in Palma de Mallorca, this time coming from Romania, and on January 28 it returned to Washington. It's not clear why the Americans didn't fly directly from Afghanistan to Mallorca.

[Swiss Senator] Dick Marty, who investigated the suspicious CIA operations for the Council of Europe, wrote in his report: "It is quite unlikely that the airplane stopped in Romania for refueling." After the kidnapping of el-Masri, the Boeing could easily have reached Palma de Mallorca from Afghanistan without a stop in between. Marty assumes therefore that the CIA dropped off one of their prisoners from Kabul in Romania, a reference to the secret prisons that the CIA is thought to maintain in Eastern Europe. Mallorca was never approached on routes used by the CIA when its aircraft carried prisoners; according to Marty, the Mediterranean island served as a starting point and resting place in between the long prisoner-flights between Afghanistan, Europe and North Africa. For the sake of convention the Americans half-camouflaged themselves: they arrived at the hotels with diplomatic passports, and at least some of them may have used fake names. The user of the Boeing was listed as a company called Stevens Express Leasing."

HOTEL BILL OVER $160,000

Nonetheless the investigators quickly discovered a clear pattern. The agents could have recovered from their duties in other cities; they could have stayed in different hotels or even slept in the airplane. But the CIA, it seems, decided such games of hide and seek weren't necessary. When the Americans kidnapped Abu Omar from Milan, a year before they kidnapped el-Masri, twenty-two agents used ordinary mobile telephones which left evidence all over the country. After the successful operation they spoiled themselves by spending several days in a luxury hotel in Venice, and for this the hotel bills alone amounted to almost $160,000, paid for with CIA credit cards.

Perhaps this was a small material compensation for the fact that the agents in what is described by the U.S. Government as "the war on terror" had to undertake such dirty jobs. When the Italian government issued arrest warrants against the suspected Americans, the CIA is said to have been surprised. In the meantime, however, the American agents are afraid of the legal consequences of their actions: They have obtained insurance to protect themselves against possible civil suits by the people they kidnapped.

Of course there are differences between Osama bin Laden, ringleader of a theocratic terrorist movement and George Bush, a popularly elected president of the most powerful democracy in the world. Nevertheless, the two have done comparable damage to the United States and the rest of the world: bin Laden with his insane and merciless crusade, Bush with his policy of illegal war and combat methods rejected under universal legal norms: illegal detentions, torture and kangaroo courts ...

Eight days ago marked the fifth anniversary of the al-Qaeda attacks. It was a moment to remember those that have been lost and learn from past mistakes. But nothing seems to teach Bush, as he has presented a proposal to Congress that would legalize the tortures committed in the past, authorize them in the future, and exempt the United States from some of the rules of the Geneva Conventions, the global treaty meant to limit the savagery of war. "What is the meaning of [the words] human dignity?" he asked sarcastically, [in reference to what he said was the vague wording of the Geneva Conventions].

If the law passes, the CIA could detain suspects in secret prisons for indeterminate periods of time, interrogate them under torture and judge them under special military tribunals. Many dictatorships have done this, but on the margins of the law. Now the president of a democracy that has wanted to set an example is attempting to consecrate such barbaric statutes as part of Federal law.

Almost every Democratic Congressman as well as a growing group of Republicans (whom Bush accuses of "leaving the public defenseless") has opposed this illegal attempt, in addition to venerable former judges, lawyers of the Armed Forces, and generals such as Bush's ex-Secretary of State, Colin Powell. According to him, the proposal would make the world, "doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism." The most prominent members of the foreign and domestic press are scandalized by Bush's proposal, and many sympathetic governments view with horror this historic regression.

And what about Colombia? We know that because of government decisions taken without public debate, we are the only South American country that is taking part in the war against Iraq, and is supporting Washington's bellicose adventure. But we ignore the why, when and how of the way we got involved in this assault against international law. Digging through the archives reveals that on December 12, 2003, our ambassador to the U.N., Luis Guillermo Giraldo, declared in the Security Council that Colombia "supports the attack against Hussein," and believes that in this case, the "use of force" is justified.

Colombians have the right to say whether we want to continue being associated with this atrocity; whether we agree with it that Uribe backs this contempt for the United Nations and the Geneva Conventions; and if we are okay with the existence of secret prisons for torturing prisoners of war. It's time to clarify things and have the national debate that was never permitted by Uribe and Giraldo. As if we citizens didn't even exist.

No one talked about it much at the time, but those now-forgotten photos of torture and humiliation at Abu Ghraib were the kind of extreme homoerotic kink your local porn vendor keeps hidden under the counter. Iraqi inmates of mental asylums led around like dogs on leashes. Iraqi prisoners, almost all later released as innocent, stripped of their clothes and forced to pile on top of each other naked.

Of course, America's state media censored the most disturbing images. Hundreds of photos showed sex acts between and among soldiers and detainees. Male prisoners were videotaped while being forced to masturbate and have sex with one another. They were forced to wear women's underwear. U.S. soldiers, CIA torturers and private mercenaries hired by the Bush Defense Department sodomized them with flashlights and possibly broomsticks. They were kept naked for days at a time. Some were smeared with feces.

The photos, said a spokesman for U.S. military forces in Iraq earlier this year, "do not reflect what is happening at Abu Ghraib now." Because the Red Cross has long been banned from visiting the prison, there's no way to know if that's true. We do know, however, that enforced nudity and other gayer-than-gay torture tactics have become de rigueur at other outposts of Bush's post-9/11 gulag archipelago, including Guantánamo Bay, Afghanistan's Bagram concentration camp and the secret CIA prisons in Central and South Asia and Eastern Europe.

Moreover, torture has continued at Abu Ghraib since the United States turned over the facility to Iraq's puppet regime about two weeks ago. "Prisoners released from the jail this week spoke of routine torture of terrorism suspects and on [September 6], 27 prisoners were hanged in the first mass execution since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein's regime," reported the British Independent newspaper. "Conditions in the rest of the jail were grim, with an overwhelming stench of excrement, prisoners crammed into cells for all but 20 minutes a day, food rations cut to just rice and water and no air conditioning."

The U.S. government's Boys Gone Wild, terrified that the courts could force them to fork over millions of dollars to their victims, buy torture insurance from the Arlington, Virginia-based Wright & Co. for $300 a year. If Americans ever come to their senses, however, our homotorturers could also face prison sentences. That's why George W. Bush wants to legalize the CIA's "alternative interrogation techniques" prohibited by the Geneva Conventions and the laws of 192 of the world's 193 nations. (The Pacific island of Nauru, which hasn't gotten around to ratification, might be a good spot to set up another "secret site.")

So what are the "alternative interrogation techniques"?

A well-sourced and repeatedly confirmed ABC News report lists six. In the "Attention Grab," the interrogator shakes a victim by his shirt. (This assumes that he isn't already nude.) The "Attention" and "Belly Slaps" are "aimed at causing pain and triggering fear." Then there's "Long Time Standing," in which victims are forced to stand for more than 40 hours straight. "Water Boarding" is the medieval practice of tying a victim to a board and dunking him under water. "Cellophane is wrapped over the prisoner's face and water is poured over him. Unavoidably, the gag reflex kicks in and a terrifying fear of drowning leads to almost instant pleas to bring the treatment to a halt."

In order to work in American military intelligence, it seems, you really have to like looking at wet naked men with hard, erect nipples. In particular, it helps to be into wet naked Middle Eastern men. As a guy who looks away from other dudes in locker rooms, I doubt I'd fit in.

Now one right-wing Republican, George W. Bush, is fighting a gang of right-wing Republican senators over homoerotic torture tactics. The debate isn't about whether, but rather what kind, of homoerotic torture ought to be permissible. Bush is pretty much a whatever-it-takes, pro-flashlight-raping freak. Senators John McCain and John Warner are a little more vanilla. They want to set a few limits.

Very few limits.

Jeffrey H. Smith, ex-general counsel for the Clinton-era CIA, says the senators are OK with the current menu of torture. "The senators seem to be prepared to allow some techniques, but not nearly as many as the administration wants," he told The New York Times. Bush, on the other hand, wants to allow just about any form of pain infliction the human mind can conceive.

This, my fellow citizens, is what we've come to. No one, not even the nominally opposition Democrats, dares suggest the obvious--that both sets of gay-torture-loving right-wing Republicans are out of their filthy little minds.

(Ted Rall is the author of the new book "Silk Road to Ruin: Is Central Asia the New Middle East?," an in-depth prose and graphic novel analysis of America's next big foreign policy challenge.)

From the WaPo editorial board:

"Mr. Bush wanted Congress to formally approve these practices and to declare them consistent with the Geneva Conventions. It will not. But it will not stop him either, if the legislation is passed in the form agreed on yesterday."

La la la la la la la, I don't hear any screaming, la la la la la la...

Since this agreement to not publicly disagree, the press, Froomkin writes, "tendencies will be to cover the issue mostly from the angle of its effectiveness as a political cudgel in the mid-term elections."

Among his suggested questions:

Here's a question reporters should be asking: If, as Suskind has alleged, the administration is aware that those harsh CIA interrogation tactics don't really work -- and no one is currently in CIA detention anyway -- then why is this such an important issue for the White House? One possible answer: That this has nothing to do with the future; that it's about giving them cover for their actions in the past.

And:

Finally, as the White House gears up to use detainee policy as a political issue, it is incumbent on the press to remind the public that there are not only two choices: Doing it Bush's way and letting terrorists go free. Even if the Democrats aren't coherent about other alternatives, the press should be.

(WaPo.com)

Evan Derkacz is a New York-based writer and contributor to AlterNet.