Bill Clinton warns against wide torture approval

[stu]

Former U.S. President Bill Clinton joined a chorus of critics of Bush administration proposals for the treatment of suspected terrorists, saying they would give broad approval to torture.

 

"You don't need blanket advance approval for blanket torture," Clinton said in an interview with National Public Radio aired on Thursday.

 

He said any decision to use harsh treatment in interrogating suspects should be subject to court review.

 

President George W. Bush wants Congress to narrowly define prisoner protections under the Geneva Conventions and allow a program of CIA interrogations and detentions that critics have said amount to torture.

 

The White House denies its interrogation program involves torture. The U.S. Supreme Court in June struck down Bush's original plan.

 

Clinton said it was unwise to circumvent international standards on prisoner treatment, citing U.S. abuses at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison, criticized treatment at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba and a secret CIA prison system outside the United States.

 

"The president says he's just trying to get the rules clear about how far the CIA can go when they're when they whacking these people around in these secret prisons," Clinton said in NPR's "Morning Edition" interview, recorded on Wednesday.

 

"If you go around passing laws that legitimize a violation of the Geneva Convention and institutionalize what happened at Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo, we're going to be in real trouble," he said.

 

TWO EX-PRESIDENTS CRITICIZE

 

Clinton was president during the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and attacks on U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya and on the USS Cole, all linked to al Qaeda. Critics accused him of doing too little to contain a growing threat of terrorism.

 

He was the second former Democratic U.S. president to criticize the policy by the Republican Bush this week. On Monday, former President Jimmy Carter told Reuters the Bush administration was condoning the torture of suspects and had tried to redefine torture "to make it convenient for them."

 

Carter praised Republican Sens. John McCain of Arizona and John Warner of Virginia for trying to block the Bush policy on treatment of suspected terrorists. Bush's former secretary of state, Colin Powell, and William S. Cohen, who was secretary of defense under Clinton, also backed the stand of McCain, Warner and Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham (news, bio, voting record) of South Carolina.

 

"I think it's important to support Senators McCain and Warner in this," Cohen said on Thursday. "We don't want to be seen as sanctioning torture. We're held to a higher standard and we don't want to put our troops at a higher risk."

 

Clinton said that, even if there were circumstances where such treatment is necessary to prevent an imminent attack: "You don't make laws based on that. You don't sit there and say in general torture's fine if you're a terrorist suspect. For one thing, we know we have erred in who was a real suspect."

 

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060921/pl_nm/...HE0BHNlYwN0bWE-