A Heart Revealed

Whatever the President may claim about his religious convictions, his true convictions are being revealed in the Congressional debate over whether to sanction torture of terrorist suspects. The President wants new rules that contravene the Geneva Conventions:

The officials said the CIA and the White House are convinced that retaining access to these methods is key to extracting information from captured terrorism suspects who have urgently needed information about dangerous plots.

Congressional critics of this position have some support from within the government: Neither the FBI nor the Defense Department allows the use of the CIA's harshest techniques, and last week senior Pentagon officials said they believe that more cooperative forms of interrogation produce better results than inflicting extreme discomfort.

But the CIA feels differently. A memo sent by CIA Director Michael V. Hayden to the agency's employees Thursday approvingly quoted Bush's endorsement of the CIA interrogations for "defending the homeland, attacking [al-Qaeda] . . . and saving thousands of American and allied lives." Hayden said in the memo that the clarifying language of the administration's bill would give him confidence that what he "asked an Agency officer to do under the program is lawful."

The rival Senate bill on interrogations -- approved by the Armed Services Committee on Thursday and sharply criticized by Bush yesterday -- is silent on how the CIA should comply with the Geneva Conventions. Its intent, according to several government officials, is not only to avoid sending a signal to other nations that Washington is reinterpreting its treaty obligations, but to leave in place a historic understanding of international law, which would render unlawful many of the extreme interrogation techniques the CIA has been using.

Bush and other senior officials have not discussed what those methods include, but the president described them as an "alternative set of procedures," emphasizing that they differ from those used elsewhere in the government.

At a news conference yesterday, Bush alluded to these special methods when he said the new legislation was needed to provide "intelligence professionals with the tools they need."

The world, in the President's view is a dark and dangerous place and the only way to defeat the forces of darkness is to think like them and behave like them. And in that way he becomes one of them. I wonder if the President has ever read The Lord of the Rings.

Let's hope he is not allowed to take our country down this path.