House can’t undo waterboarding veto
WASHINGTON – House Democrats failed Tuesday to override President Bush’s veto of a ban on waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques and castigated the administration for subjecting prisoners to torture in the fight against terrorism.
“We are on stronger ground ethically and morally … when we do not torture,” said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., in closing the debate. “Our ability to lead the world depends not only on our military might but on our moral authority.”
With a two-thirds vote required to overturn the veto, the vote fell short, 225-188.
The bill Bush vetoed authorized money for intelligence agencies and included a provision to limit the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies to interrogation tactics allowed by the Army manual used by military interrogators. The manual outlaws eight techniques, including waterboarding, a method that simulates drowning and is widely considered torture.
The Democrats knew they would not win the vote. Instead, the debate hit upon hot-button issues likely to stoke the presidential election this year.
“Torture is no proper tool in the arsenal of democracy,” said Rep. Lloyd Doggett, D-Texas. “If we abandon our American values, we lose who we are as Americans. … And if the administration and all of its apologists … continue to force America to abandon our values, we will lose the war.”
Torture, he said, “is not only un-American, it is ineffective.”
Republicans trumpeted their own causes, criticizing Pelosi for failing to bring up a bill that would overhaul the nation’s electronic surveillance practices. House Democrats object to the president’s demand that the bill include a provision giving legal immunity to telecommunications companies that cooperated with U.S. monitoring of suspected terrorists.
“We are putting our homeland at greater risk,” said Rep. Peter Hoekstra, R-Mich. “For 30 days we have been avoiding dealing with the tough issue.” Noting that waterboarding had not been used in five years, Hoekstra denounced the delay in tackling the “hard stuff” in “doing what is necessary in giving the tools to the intelligence community to keep us safe.”
Republicans also criticized Democrats for 26 earmarks in the bill, which Rep. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., called “spy pork,” saying that “if ever there was a case study in why we need an earmark moratorium, this bill is it.”
The Bush administration has opposed taking any interrogation options off the table, saying that would rob U.S. investigators of important tools.
In a statement after the vote, press secretary Dana Perino said, “The bill would have eliminated the legal alternative procedures in place in the CIA program to question the world’s most dangerous and violent terrorists.”
The president has said waterboarding yielded information that helped deter terrorist attacks in the United States.