President George W. Bush’s administration has for some time been extolling the virtues of propagating democracy to justify the war in Iraq. This humanitarian rhetoric is all that remains of Bush’s justification of the war, now that the alleged connections between Iraq and the World Trade Center attacks have been exposed as baseless conjecture and supposed caches of weapons of mass destruction failed to materialize. Yet Bush’s reliance on this humanitarian rhetoric lends particular irony to the April 2004 revelations that U.S. Army personnel had abused Iraqi prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison in episodes dating back to 2003 and to the allegations of abuse at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp that subsequently emerged.

The Bush administration itself played a central role in these scandals through its unilateral determination in 2002 that detainees in the “war on terror” did not qualify for prisoner of war protections under the Geneva Conventions. Emerging evidence of further misconduct only underscores the troubling consequences of this policy. The Army is now looking into claims of widespread prisoner abuse in Iraq leveled by Capt. Ian Fishback and other members of an 82nd Airborne Division unit. Fishback has emphasized that the abuses occurred in large part because many interrogating troops were not sure of which techniques they were allowed to employ. In a letter to Republican Senator John McCain, he noted that after 17 months of investigating he remained “unable to get clear, consistent answers from my leadership about what constitutes lawful and humane treatment of detainees.”

With the humanitarian arguments for invading Iraq increasingly tinged with revolting irony, Bush is now reduced to empty rhetoric about “staying the course.” At the same time, it is increasingly clear that the Bushies simply fail to take the torture problem seriously. Timothy Flanigan, Bush’s nominee for deputy attorney general who recently withdrew his name amid controversy over his connections with indicted Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff, was particularly revealing under confirmation questioning from Senator Richard Durbin. Flanigan insisted that the lawfulness of any interrogation technique “depends on the facts and circumstances” and that the term “inhumane” could not be coherently defined. Durbin himself was unjustly condemned last June by Vice President Dick Cheney and other conservative rottweilers simply for voicing the utterly reasonable observation that an FBI agent’s descriptions of abused prisoners – tied in fetal positions for over 24 hours, unfed and lying in their own excrement – depicted a level of abusiveness often naively associated only with stories of Nazi or Stalinist concentration camps.

Our Republican-controlled Senate finally responded to the abuse scandals on Oct. 5 with a 90-9 vote in favor of McCain’s anti-torture amendment, attached to a $440 billion military spending bill. The amendment clarifies the definition of “enemy combatants,” the procedural rules for military tribunals and the interrogation techniques authorized for use by U.S. personnel, regardless of determinations of POW status. McCain – himself a prisoner during the Vietnam War that Bush avoided – explained the amendment as a response to the need for consistent standards of conduct to prevent the confusion that encourages abuses in the field. Yet during its formulation, the amendment received fierce opposition from Cheney and faced an explicit veto threat in a White House Statement of Administration Policy issued on July 20. These threats were reiterated by White House press secretary Scott McClellan in the wake of last week’s Senate vote.

The White House justified the veto threat by claiming McCain’s amendment would prevent Bush from effectively prosecuting the war on terror. This is nonsense. The amendment merely ensures that the war will be prosecuted responsibly, insofar as this is possible now that all justifications initially offered for invading Iraq have been thoroughly discredited. If Bush takes the improbable route of vetoing the military spending bill to which the amendment is shrewdly attached – or if House Republicans, more plausibly, toe the Administration line and aim to cripple the amendment – the scandalousness of the story so far will become immeasurably more appalling.

Sam Harding-Forrester is a senior in LAS. His column appears every Thursday. He can be reached at [email protected].