[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 153 (2007), Part 15]
[Senate]
[Page 20995]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                            COMMON ARTICLE 3

 Mr. OBAMA. Mr. President, like much of the Senate, I was taken 
aback to hear what the Attorney General had to say--and what he refused 
to say--before the Judiciary Committee this week. It is the latest in 
an effort to obfuscate and avoid accountability on issues of vital 
importance to this country's well being.
  I fear the same was true on Friday, when the President signed an 
Executive order on Geneva Conventions Common Article 3 as Applied to a 
Program of Detention and Interrogation.
  A year and a half ago, the Congress overwhelmingly adopted the McCain 
amendment to ensure that no prisoner in our Nation's custody is ever 
subjected to torture or cruel treatment. Since then, all agencies of 
our Government have been abiding by the humane and professional 
standards in the U.S. Army's Field Manual on interrogation, and 
getting, by the administration's own account, excellent intelligence in 
the war on terror.
  I am deeply concerned that President Bush may now be trying to reopen 
the door to cruelty that Congress shut. While the Executive order 
appears to rule out unlawful treatment, the administration has said 
that the order allows the CIA to resume at least some elements of its 
``enhanced interrogation'' program, and to use methods beyond those 
that our military employs. The administration still refuses to rule out 
torture techniques such as water boarding.
  As our own military leadership repeatedly warns, if we say we can 
lawfully use an interrogation technique on enemy prisoners, what is 
there to prevent our enemies from employing the same interrogation 
technique on captured American military personnel? On Sunday, Director 
of National Intelligence Admiral McConnell acknowledged that the CIA 
can now use techniques to which he would not want to see American 
citizens subjected.
  A policy that permits cruel and inhumane treatment at the hands of 
any U.S. Government personnel--whether referred to as ``enhanced 
interrogation'' techniques or any other name--is simply 
counterproductive to an effective war against terrorists. As General 
Petraeus put it in his recent directive to those under his command in 
Iraq:

       Some may argue that we would be more effective if we 
     sanctioned torture or other expedient methods to obtain 
     information from the enemy. They would be wrong. Beyond the 
     basic fact that such actions are illegal, history shows that 
     they also are frequently neither useful nor necessary.

  These words are no less applicable to practices of the CIA.
  Beyond the fact that they are neither useful nor necessary, torture 
and cruel and inhumane treatment of those in U.S. custody diminish the 
moral authority our country needs to wage an effective war against 
terrorists, and are simply used by al-Qaida as a recruitment tool to 
enlist more enemies faster than we can take them off the battlefield.
  Every agency of our Government should be held to the same 
interrogation standards that our military lives and swears by. No one 
should be subject to treatment that would outrage us if inflicted on an 
American. Whenever America has been threatened in the past, there has 
been a divide in our country between those who believe that our 
liberties and laws make us weaker, and those who believe they make us 
stronger. I believe that our commitment to the rule of law is our 
greatest strength. We will win this war as we have won every great 
conflict in our history--by staying true to who we are and to the 
values that distinguish us from our enemies.
  (At the request of Mr. Reid, the following statement was ordered to 
be printed in the Record.)

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