Bridge Over Troubled Waters

As they say in Bush World, if you're not for waterboarding, the terrorists win. So strike a blow for freedom, and dunk 'em if you got 'em. Another mission accomplished, fellow Americans!

Some lawmakers who are mostly rational on domestic issues quit making sense when it came to Iraq. One of them is Missouri's senior senator, Kit Bond, ranking Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee.

When someone of Bond's stature claims not to know about waterboarding by the CIA, which just admitted to having done this during the Iraq war, then it's really time to bring the troops home.

It's evident that battle fatigue and post-traumatic stress have spread to the Tidal Basin.

Man overboard!

Bond has become more conservative, hawkish and strident since Bush II. He has supported the White House from pre-emption to Iraqi Freedom to the surge. His son, a Marine, served in Iraq. Bond is one of few lawmakers with a child who risked his life in this war.

You'd think that he would want our country to help establish the ground rules for prisoner treatment and uphold traditionally American values in wartime and become a model for right, not wrong.

Recently Bond dived deep into the Bushofascist abyss to extract an ambiguous defense of waterboarding.

The senator appeared on PBS, where journalist Gwen Ifill interviewed him for the "NewsHour with Jim Lehrer." Ifill asked Bond to address the CIA's tardy admission, made after a New York Times probe, that the agency destroyed videotapes of interrogators waterboarding a detainee. She wanted his reaction to CIA Director Michael Hayden's Capitol Hill testimony.

Ifill asked Bond whether waterboarding by the CIA constitutes torture. His response was shocking but revealing. Bond now says he was taken out of context and regrets that his reply "left the wrong impression." Don't think so.

Bond didn't tread water with Ifill.

He responded without hesitation. He spoke with authority. Too bad what he said was dumb and misleading.

"What the CIA is doing is not torture. It conforms to the Detainee Treatment Act, the Geneva Convention, the Convention Against Torture," said Bond. "None of these things that are being used, by any stretch of the imagination, could be described as torture."

Meanwhile, the House of Representatives went on to vote 222-199 to outlaw waterboarding. The House took this unnecessary stance in part because The Decider continues to insist, despite credible contradiction, that the U.S. does not torture.

Yes, Virginia, and Porter Goss is Poseidon.

The House vote, part of sweeping intelligence legislation, illuminated tactics within the Army Field Manuals. The manuals explicitly list waterboarding as one of the eight prohibited interrogation methods. Torture is banned in the Geneva Conventions. When waterboarding has been used against Americans, it has been condemned as a war crime.

Ifill is fair-minded and tried to give Bond an opportunity to clarify his position. But Bond sank lower and made even less sense. By the end of the segment, he was gargling.

"There are different ways of doing it. It's like swimming, freestyle, backstroke," he said. Maybe he thought she asked about surfboarding and not waterboarding, which is simulated drowning.

"The waterboarding could be used almost to define some of the techniques that our trainees are put through, but that's beside the point. It's not being used."

He quickly added that he "certainly would not favor it were it used." Which of course, it isn't. That's the Bushofascists' story, and as usual, they're sticking to it.

Rhonda Chriss Lokeman (lokeman@kcstar.com) is a columnist for The Kansas City Star. To find out more about Rhonda Chriss Lokeman and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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