A Vital Election-year Initiative Against Torture = Scott Horton

May 21, 1:44 PM, 2008 · No Comment · http://harpers.org/archive/2008/05/hbc-90002973
A Vital Election-year Initiative Against Torture
By Scott Horton

This post is about “No Torture. No Exceptions.” It’s an initiative with which I am deeply involved, dedicated to making certain that each presidential candidate makes stopping torture part of their campaign platform.

In its self-declared war on terror, the Bush Administration overturned an American legacy that stretched back to General Washington’s orders at Trenton and Princeton in 1776. The administration repudiated the order that the first and greatest Republican president issued in the heat of the Civil War, in 1863, prohibiting torture and official cruelty. The consequences have been nothing less than disastrous. Americans have been struggling back to regain the nation’s legacy of integrity, and the struggle starts within the Party of Lincoln. As the field of contenders narrowed, it surely was not coincidental that the three survivors—McCain, Huckabee and Paul—were united by one point: their rejection of the torture dogma.

The moral issue hovering over the 2008 election is the Bush Administration’s embrace of torture as a tool of statecraft. This mistake must be thoroughly repudiated, and the nation must undertake a vow never to repeat it. And this issue should not be allowed to divide the nation as a premise of partisan rancor. There is hope in this election year to reverse one of the most fateful decisions in our nation’s history–the decision after 9/11 to disregard America’s historic values and to use torture in the “war on terror.”

All the remaining Presidential candidates–John McCain in the Republican Party, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in the Democratic Party–have publicly stated their opposition to the use of torture. Now each of these presidential candidates must get their parties to adopt at their Conventions a party platform plank that returns America to its historic position of absolutely rejecting torture–anywhere, on anyone, for any reason.

VIDEO clip from Taxi to the Dark Side

“No Torture. No Exceptions” means:

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n/t

We need to show the world that we have the resolve to punish war criminals,
before the Bush Junta War Criminals bring down another 9/11 or worse.