The torture bill is S.3930. Call your Senators (R or D) and tell them that codifying torture into law and denying detainees habeas corpus goes against 230 years of American history, not to mention ethics and Judeo-Christian teachings.
Find your Senator’s contact information here.
if I’m not mistaken, immunity from prosecution for war crimes is bundled in the same Senate bill. Although on the surface, the impression it leaves is concern over CIA interrogators being charged for illegal techniques, in reality, the chief purpose is to immunize teh higher-ups (Bush and his Cabinet) via the same shared exemptions granted to lower level personell. S.3930 then, is not to sanction or clarify the military tribunals’ disregard of habeas corpus in the detainees’s defense, but instead to embed an escape hatch to circumvent the War Crimes Act (1996) which relates to the Geneva Conventions. Bush seeks to grant himself a presidential self-pardon in advance of future indictments thereof. Time is of essense for Bush to pass the bill through Congress before the Nov. elections, in case there’s a Democrat takeover of the House/Senate. The horrendous thing about the bill is that it imunizes the President against and charges “retroactively” back to 9/11 even though the torture, ect., were clear infractions of the Geneva Conventions then. The saving grace is that the Geneva Conventions forbades any local laws enacted to supercede it’s terms. Of course, a new Congress could as well past legislation that nullify this camoflage of a bill.
I have the distinct pleasure of having Ted Kennedy and John Kerry as my United States Senators. No calls or letters are required on my part with regard to these unspeakable pieces of legislation, thankfully.
It’s too bad that Congressmen don’t pay any attention to anyone outside their district, because there are a lot of them I’d contact in lieu of my own.