Thursday, September 14, 2006

GOP Senators on the move

WASHINGTON, D.C. (Reuters)--Defying President George W. Bush, a group of Senate Republicans hoping someday to run for president said on Wednesday they would press ahead with legislation to protect foreign terrorism suspects from the medieval S&M routine the Bush Family says is absolutely crucial to CIA intelligence-gathering.

Ambitious Republicans on the Senate Armed Services Committee strongly denounced the Bush Crime Family's plan to implement Kafkaesque judicial mindfucks on the people they've kidnapped to Guantanamo Bay, which critics say would be a major step in our development into the Evil Empire of the 21st Century.

"How many more times do we need to create legislation that's defective, that's going to confuse people, that's got not a snowball's chance in hell of passing Supreme Court muster? I mean, we look like assholes up here," South Carolina Republican Senator Lindsey Graham said of Bush's desperate proposal.

Bush, who has come under fire for the torture of prisoners at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and various ex-Soviet hellholes in his multinational gulag, needs Congress to make it legal for him to do what he wants, since the Supreme Court ruled in June that under existing U.S. law, he can't.

The Bush Family is backing legislation that would gut the Geneva Conventions' requirement for humane treatment of prisoners, arguing it is essential to protect CIA interrogators from prosecution when they beat someone to death for not knowing what the fuck they're talking about.

Armed Services chairman John Warner of Virginia told reporters the committee was scheduled to vote on Thursday on a bill he crafted with Graham and Arizona Republican Senator John McCain that was less disgusting and un-American than Bush's bill.

Warner said negotiations were nevertheless continuing with the Bush Family on a compromise bill that might avert an old-school Republican bloodbath when the legislation goes to the floor, possibly next week.

With support from Democrats and moderate Republicans, Warner, McCain and Graham could thwart efforts of doomed Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist of Tennessee to pass Bush's plan.

The Bush Family increased pressure on the senators to back off, telling them CIA operations would fail and everyone would die under their bill.

Graham dismissed that, asking if the United States was going to be "the first country in the world that changes the Geneva Conventions so that secret police programs of those nations would be okay? I know his grandfather worked for Hitler, but you can take a thing too far."

McCain, who was tortured both as a war prisoner in Vietnam and as a presidential candidate in South Carolina, said the effect would be to weaken the Geneva Conventions' protections, which he said would backfire on U.S. personnel in future wars Republicans start.

But fellow Republican Senator John Cornyn of Texas, a rabid fan of all of Bush's sadomasochistic twists, said it was essential to "provide a clear legal standard as to what does and does not constitute a war crime in a way that removes that burden from our intelligence officials when they're committing them."

Without that, he said the CIA would be unable to use torture to get the answers the Bush Family wants.

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