update: Many of you have mentioned that torture is already illegal, and that there are laws against waterboarding in particular. And that's true. And, until this President, we never had a chief executive who wanted to blur those lines. But this President has been intent on defining "torture" differently, and his Administration claims that the CIA is not bound by the same statutes as the military. That was why Judge Mukasey's refusal to define waterboarding as torture worried me: that ambiguity seemed consistent with the Administration's views. So, what this legislation does is make it completely clear that all of our government is bound by the same restrictions as the military, period. It explicitly says that waterboarding is torture, and is therefore illegal. It closes a loophole that the Administration has been intent on exploiting.
We could argue until we're blue in the face on whether that loophole is real or not, but that won't stop anything. We need to assert the power of the legislative branch and make clear exactly what the law is, for this and all future Administrations. We need to do what we can to make it crystal clear what we stand for as a nation.
update2: Another update - I find it's better to answer common questions up here.
Many of you asked what the purpose of the petition is and where that fits in to the campaign. Petitions are good for one thing: letting people know a lot of people care about an issue. So I'll submit the numbers and list of people on the petition to my colleagues to let them know how many Americans want a change on this. But that can't be the end; petitions are only the first step, just to get people's attention. We need to do much, much more, and I intend on doing so. We need to keep building up the pressure, calling in to Congress and especially raise the heat in our greater society over this. So the petition is a great first step, but, like I said, it's only a first step. I've seen too many petitions in my time that weren't followed up with effective advocacy, and I'm determined that won't happen here. If a petition is the whole campaign, that's not much of a campaign and won't change people's minds.
update3: OK, to answer another recurring question: no, this doesn't immunize anyone or give legal cover to prior activities. This simply makes clear that the Army's guidelines governing the military's conduct also apply to every agency of the American government. Vice President Cheney tried to get the Republican Congress to create a special loophole for the CIA in 2005 that muddied the waters on what they could and couldn't do. It's that perceived loophole they are trying to exploit, as I mentioned earlier. We're bringing clarity to this issue, rather than allowing any bad behavior to fester in the shadows. But, just to be clear, this doesn't, as some people have asked, create any immunity for any actions that were illegal before. We're just shining a bright light on this behavior, drawing clear lines that even the Bush Administration or future Republican Administration (if there are any) will understand, and saying, "Our government will not torture. Ever."
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/11/7/908/72619
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