Pyrrhic Victory in Iraq

Pyrrhic Victory in Iraq: "editorial | posted October 20, 2005 (November 7, 2005 issue)
Pyrrhic Victory in Iraq

The approval of the Iraqi Constitution in the October 15 referendum is another Pyrrhic victory for the Bush Administration in its effort to salvage its failed Iraq project. Like the January election and the other so-called democratic landmarks before it, the ratification of the Constitution may momentarily slow the erosion of domestic US support for the occupation. But also like the January election, the Constitution is almost certain to exacerbate sectarian divisions in Iraq while doing little or nothing to undermine popular support for the insurgency.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has taken the lead in spinning the outcome of the vote, arguing that the referendum has brought the Sunnis into the political process and suggesting that the Constitution now provides an accepted legal framework for governing Iraq. But evidence on the ground rebuts these claims. By international standards, the process for drafting and approving the Constitution was flawed from the beginning. In part because they boycotted the January election, the Sunnis, who make up about 20 percent of the population, were badly underrepresented in the National Assembly and thus were largely frozen out of the decision-making. Not surprisingly, the document reflected Shiite and Kurdish domination of the government, especially on questions relating to the federal structure of the country. Last-minute amendments, reportedly engineered by US Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, including limits on de-Baathification, did soften some of the more offensive parts of the Constitution but did not alter the features most unacceptable to the Sunni minority other than to permit further revisions after the December elections. That's why they took part in the vote--not, as Rice implied, to approve the political process but to register their profound disagreement with the Constitution and Shiite dominance.

The underlying cause of Sunni rejection remains the issue of federalism and the desire of the Shiites and Kurds for regional autonomy. The Constitution would permit the establishment of a highly autonomous nine-province region for the predominantly Shiite south as well as a three-province Kurdish region in the north. Many Sunnis, along with Shiite nationalists loyal to Muqtada al-Sadr, oppose such a loose federal structure because it would severely weaken the central government and exclude them from a share in Iraq's oil resources, which lie in the southern and northern parts of the country.


There is also the sensitive issue of the role of Islam. The Constitution declares Islam to be a primary source of legislation and calls for the appointment of experts in Sharia (Islamic law) to the Supreme Federal Court; this has sparked concerns among women and among Iraqis who favor a secular state. Moreover, the Constitution does not address the most explosive issue of all--the presence of foreign troops and foreign bases on Iraqi soil--and tacitly accepts many of the laws relating to the privatization of Iraqi industry imposed on the country by the Coalition Provisional Authority in the first days of the occupation. Occupation and the privatization of industry are anathema to most Iraqis.

Given the country's internal divisions, the overall effect of the referendum's approval may be to accelerate Iraq's "descent into civil war and disintegration," as the International Crisis Group warned before the vote. That outcome is even more likely if the charges of fraud and ballot-stuffing lodged against the Shiite-dominated government are shown to be true. In short, rather than bringing more Sunnis into the process, the ratification of the Constitution, along with widespread accusations of fraud perpetrated by the Shiite-led government, could fuel more Sunni anger and disenchantment, prompting more support for the insurgency.

Even more worrying, there is growing evidence that Iraqis are losing patience with the "democratic" process as well as with the occupation. As recent interviews by various journalists have shown, Iraqis are increasingly angry at the growing corruption, the lack of electricity and water, and the widespread anarchy. They blame the current government and, above all, the US occupation for this deplorable state of affairs. For these Iraqis the Constitution is at best irrelevant and at worst just another US-imposed measure that will only increase the violence and make the country's problems more unmanageable. The only democratic landmark that really matters to them--the only one capable of reversing the spiral into more chaos and war, the only one that would create the conditions for real compromise--is an end to the occupation. Yet this is the one step the Bush Administration is unwilling to consider. Until it does, there is little hope that the deepening violence in Iraq will end.

Public Relations: Manipulation replaces Authority — asadi.org

Muhammed Asadi: Public Relations: Manipulation replaces Authority — asadi.org: "Public Relations: Manipulation replaces Authority
Tuesday 27th September 2005, by Muhammed Asadi



KAREN Hughes, the public face of the Bush Presidential Campaign (in 2000), was sworn in as undersecretary of state for public diplomacy recently. The president explained during the swearing in ceremony that Hughes is being appointed to explain 'our policies and fundamental values' to people around the world, specifically to the Arab and Muslim world (Bush names aide to sell US image). Before embarking on this huge task, Ms. Hughes would do well to begin at home. Recent polls suggest that not only are people around the world weary of the policies pursued by this American administration, its own citizens are beginning to show discontent and are questioning its 'values and policies'.

The recent Hurricane Katrina disaster has not helped the government either, as revealed by the latest Pew poll (September 8, 2005) numbers. Many now question the delayed, impersonal response of an administration that had been reminding them since 9/11, through multi-colored codes and alert-levels, that their safety was the government’s number one priority. Americans, in large numbers, for possibly the first time ever, are wondering whether their government actually cares about them or merely feigns concern for ulterior motives (USA TODAY) and this AP-Ipsos Poll. They are also beginning to understand how foreigners feel about American ’values and policies’ after they’ve witnessed first hand the destruction of an entire city due to the misplaced ’values’ and neglect of its decision makers. People around the world have suffered the destruction of countless cities as a direct result of the American war machine and its ’values’ of sanctioning the powerless.

We can understand the structural context in support of which Hughes was hired to proselytize Arabs and Muslims with, in light of these quotes by C. Wright Mills:

“...the dogmas by which these (‘values and policies’) are legitimated are so widely accepted that no counter-balance of mind prevails against them...They have replaced the responsible interpretation of events with the disguise of events by a maze of public relations...” (C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite 1956: 356)

“Those in authority within institutions and social structures attempt to justify their rule by linking it, as if it were a necessary consequence, with moral symbols, sacred emblems, or legal formulae which are widely believed and deeply internalized (by the masses). These central conceptions may refer to a god or gods, “the votes of the majority”, (“freedom”, “democracy”)... or the alleged extraordinary endowment of the person of the ruler himself. Various thinkers have used different terms to refer to this phenomena: Mosca’s “political formula” or “great superstition”, Locke’s “principal of sovereignty”,Sorel’s “ruling myth”,Weber’s “legitimations”, Durkheim’s “collective representations”, Marx’s “dominant ideas”...Mannheim’s “ideology”, Herbert Spencer’s “public sentiments” (Gramsci’s “hegemony”) all point to the central place of master symbols in social analysis.” (Hans Gerth & C. Wright Mills, Character & Social Structure, 1964:277)

Karen Hughes is the latest attempt by this elite to "disguise events by a maze of public relations", as C. Wright Mills put it; we hope that people everywhere will recognize these attempts for what they are and not be duped by these visions of the "American Dream" that exists only in the minds of these "crackpot realists".

The Next Fake Threat — Nick Schwellenbach:

Nick Schwellenbach: The Next Fake Threat — Alternet

Alternet
The Next Fake Threat
Thursday 29th September 2005, by Nick Schwellenbach



CARS won’t start. The electricity and phone lines go out. Electronic devices have their circuits fried. When the aliens first appear in this summer’s remake of the 1950s sci-fi flick War of the Worlds, they are accompanied by an intense electrical storm that generates what is known as an electromagnetic pulse (EMP). Of course, the aliens then proceed to wreak further havoc slaughtering humans from their towering, spider-like machines.

However, EMP itself is not science fiction. A congressionally-mandated commission last summer went public with their unclassified executive summary that envisions terrorists detonating a nuclear warhead above the continental United States, unleashing an EMP of catastrophic proportions and thrusting our 21st century information society into darkness. Their report’s main recommendation is to spend anywhere from $20-200 billion in the next twenty years to "harden" America’s critical infrastructure (e.g. the power industry, telecommunications) from EMP.

Another one of their recommendations is that the United States should "have vigorous interdiction and interception efforts to thwart delivery." Acting Commission Chairman physicist Lowell Wood confirmed that the recommendation included a national missile defense. As the Commission argues, one missile could shut-down the entire United States, which is a powerful argument for missile defense.

The members of the Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse Attack (EMP Commission) have impressive credentials, yet they are also deeply tangled up with pro-missile defense organizations and the defense industry. Given their conflicts of interest and the controversial assumptions behind their report, questions about their credibility arise. Is the EMP Commission’s scenario realistic or is it scare mongering to rally support for a pro-missile defense agenda?

According to Charles Ferguson, a nuclear terrorism expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, terrorists would have trouble obtaining a nuclear weapon or the fissile material needed. Moreover, terrorists would likely use simple delivery means like a truck and just blow up a city to produce mass casualties, rather than launching a warhead into the sky hoping to produce EMP. (The EMP Commission vastly understates the price of a SCUD missile, which they tout as a possible delivery means. They have publicly stated that SCUDs can be purchased for $100,000. Steve Zaloga, a missile expert at the Teal Corporation, a defense consulting firm, says for a working model it would cost at least $1 million, and more for the launch system.)

The Commission has also spotlighted Iran as contemplating an EMP attack on the United States. Before Congress, EMP Commission senior staff member and ex-CIA analyst Peter Pry refers to an Iranian political military journal article translated by the CIA to support this allegation. He employs ellipses in an artful, but deceitful way to weave together quotes from this article. Problem is that this journal article doesn’t mention EMP or nuclear weapons at all. It discusses attacks on communications, but by computer attacks, not by EMP — a blatant misuse of documentation to support the EMP Commission’s case.

Perhaps the most controversial of the EMP Commission’s claims is their insistence that a Hiroshima-sized nuclear detonation (10-20 kilotons) could produce enough EMP to fry circuits across a continent. The EMP Commission points to one of the few case studies available — the Starfish Prime atmospheric nuclear test of 1962. A 1.4 megaton thermonuclear weapon detonated 250 miles above Johnston Island in the Pacific affected street lamps, circuit breakers, cars and radio stations in Hawaiian, 800 miles to the north. Still, even there the effect was far from comprehensive. Los Alamos National Laboratory physicist Michael P. Bernardin said that "the 30 strings of failed streetlights [from Starfish Prime’s EMP] represented only about one percent of the streetlamps on Oahu at the time." And noted physicist Richard Garwin said the Starfish detonation "had barely noticeable effects on military systems."

But Starfish Prime was a thermonuclear device with a yield over a hundred times that of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Experts including Garwin and Philip Coyle, former Pentagon director of operational test and evaluation, have expressed skepticism about the EMP Commission’s claim that a 10-20 kiloton nuclear device could produce EMP on par with that of a thermonuclear weapon. Both have extensive experience studying EMP.

Coyle has written that even "the U.S. military does not know how to [create thermonuclear-scale EMP from a Hiroshima-sized weapon] today, and has no way of demonstrating the capability in the future without returning to nuclear testing," he said by e-mail to Global Security Newswire. When the United States does not have this ability, needless to say, it’s unlikely that terrorist or "rogue" states could easily accomplish such a technological feat. Coyle also wrote in July, 2004 that the Commission’s report seems to "extrapolate calculations of extreme weapons effects as if they were a proven fact, and further to puff up rogue nations and terrorists with the capabilities of giants."

Commission member Lowell Wood refused to answer questions on whether rogue states or terrorists could possibly build Super-EMP devices. "You seriously don’t expect answers in an unclassified [setting] to those sorts of questions?" he asked in the Newswire e-mail. What isn’t classified, however, are the numerous ties between the EMP Commission, pro-missile defense groups and the defense industry. The International Relations Center, a left-leaning organization that tracks the right wing, has even gone as far as saying that EMP Commission chairman William R. Graham "personifies the military-industrial complex." Graham is the former science advisor to and director of President Reagan’s Office of Science and Technology Policy.

Besides current Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Graham was the only other person to be involved in both Rumsfeld Commissions, which explored the threat to the United States from ballistic missiles and in space. Both EMP Commission reports have echoed the alarmism used to justify missile defense and the proposed militarization of space supported by right-wing think tanks like the Center for Security Policy. (CSP is funded, in part, by missile defense contractors Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, TRW, and others, according to a July 2002 report by the World Policy Institute.)

It also happens that Graham and his supporters in Congress, Rep. Curt Weldon, R-Pa. and Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., are all members of the Center for Security Policy’s National Security Advisory Council. Last March, Kyl raised the specter of EMP by holding a hearing and writing an eyebrow-raising op-ed for the Washington Post on the subject. Although Weldon didn’t become chair of the House Homeland Security Committee last week, he was touting a classified memo Rumsfeld wrote on Weldon’s efforts on EMP to try and support his campaign for the position, according to The Hill newspaper. CSP President Frank Gaffney Jr. has been communicating the EMP Commission’s stance to papers such as the Dallas Morning News.

Other connections to Graham include Charles Kupperman. Kupperman is Vice President of Strategic Integration and Operations at Boeing’s Missile Defense Systems division. Kupperman, Graham and Professor William Van Cleave all taught at Southwest Missouri State University’s defense studies department. They are also on the CSP National Security Advisory Council and the board of advisors to pro-missile defense think tank the National Institute of Public Policy.

Kupperman also worked for Graham at Xsirius Superconductivity for the Missile Defense Agency in the 1990s. Because he was chairman of the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization (renamed the Ballistic Missle Defense Organization under President Clinton) at the time, he faced questions about conflicts of interest. In 1991, Graham told the Los Angeles Business Journal that "We [at Xsirius] don’t do any SDI work, and I’m certainly excluded from any role, or from gaining any information for us."

But this isn’t the only time Graham has been misleading about profiting from policies he’s helped craft. Aside from sitting on the board of directors of companies like Swales Aerospace that have recently won Missile Defense Agency contracts, Graham has been president and CEO of a small, but thriving company called National Security Research, Inc. (NSR) since 1997.

In October 1999, Graham testified before the House Armed Services Committee on the threat of an Electromagnetic Pulse Attack. In a statement, in accordance with House rules, Graham said that he had "not received any Federal grants, subgrants thereof, contracts, or subcontracts thereof during the current fiscal year or the two previous fiscal years, and he does not represent any entity in his appearance today before the House of Representatives." Yet, in National Security Research received part of a $250 million GSA contract "to protect the nation’s critical infrastructure against physical and cyber attack," as reported by Federal Times in April 1999. Intentionally or not, Graham violated a House rule.

But overall, NSR is not shy about advertising its tight connections with the Pentagon and Congress. More recently, NSR has won missile defense contracts. On its website, National Security Research announced "that it is part of the winning SPARTA Team to provide Scientific Engineering and Technical Assistance (SETA) support to the Missile Defense Agency’s Battle Management/Command and Control Directorate (MDA/BC). ... The task order started on July 1st 2005."

NSR was profiled in the March small business newsletter of the Missile Defense Agency. It seems that Graham isn’t just borrowed to work on congressional commissions, but that he makes it his business as well. From the MDA newsletter:

NSR senior staff members under Dr. Graham’s leadership continue to be involved with seminal, high-level advisory groups and congressionally mandated commissions influential in the development of missile defense policy and planning, architectures and technical concepts, and threat and countermeasure assessments including:

* The Commission to Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States;

* The Commission to Assess United States National Security Space Management and Organization; and,

* The Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse Attack.

It should be troubling that a private company with a profit motive is influencing public policy on questions of scientific and technical complexity, while national laboratories like Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore may have been left out. According to a July 2004 news clip in the newsletter Space Security Update, published by the non-partisan Center for Defense Information, "It is unclear, however, that the commission’s calculations of the nuclear design work behind the EMPs postulated in their study have been properly scientifically peer reviewed — for example, by the nation’s nuclear laboratories."

The EMP Commission is a case study in the revolving door between industry, pro-industry non-profits and the Pentagon. Of course, incorporating persons with niche expertise from industry can be a good thing; and experts’ affiliations with agenda-driven organizations do not have to affect their analysis. But at the very least, questions can and should be raised about the integrity of their conclusions and the analysis.

In a world where anything can be a threat, and where only limited resources are available to us, the public needs its government to provide assessments and actions unclouded by parochial interests.
Nick Schwellenbach is an investigator at the Project on Government Oversight (www.pogo.org).

Yelping Warriors, and Rocks in the Broth - New York Times

Yelping Warriors, and Rocks in the Broth - New York Times

Restaurants
Yelping Warriors, and Rocks in the Broth

By FRANK BRUNI
Published: October 26, 2005

CONFUSING the point of a restaurant with the mission of a "Saturday Night Live" skit, Ninja New York deposits you in a kooky, dreary subterranean labyrinth that seems better suited to coal mining than to supping. You are greeted there by servers in black costumes who ceaselessly bow, regularly yelp and ever so occasionally tumble, and you are asked to choose between two routes to your table.
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Alex Di Suvero for The New York Times

STEALTH SERVER At Ninja, the surroundings are dim, the dining nooks are cloistered and the help wears black.
Readers
Forum: Dining Out

The first is described by a ninja escort as simple and direct. The second is "dark, dangerous and narrow," involving a long tunnel and a drawbridge that descends only when your escort intones a special command, which he later implores you to keep secret.

I recommend a third path: right back out the door. Granted, you will be denied the sating of any curiosity about what a $3.5 million design budget permits in the way of faux stone walls, make-believe gorges and mock torches. You will forgo an iota of modest amusement.

But you will be spared an infinitely larger measure of tedium, a visually histrionic smorgasbord of undistinguished food and a discordant bill that can easily exceed $100 a person with tax, tip and drinks.

Ninja acts like a Disney ride - Space Mountain under a hailstorm of run-of-the-mill or unappealing sushi - but charges like Le Bernardin. It has a stringy crab dish served on a grapefruit that belches smoke, a ridiculous dessert in the shape of a frog and a whole lot of nerve.

An American offshoot of a restaurant in Tokyo, Ninja intends to evoke a Japanese mountain village inhabited by ninjas, a special breed of stealthy warriors. In this case they come armed not only with swords and sorcery but also with recipes, which may be their most dangerous weapons of all. And they roam, romp and perform dopey magic tricks, including sleight of hand with rubber bands, over 6,000 square feet of darkened crannies and well-separated, quiet nooks.

Each party of diners receives its own nook, which quickly takes on the aspect of a jail cell as the ninjas, delivering and removing dishes, laboriously slide the latticed doors open and closed, closed and open, ad infinitum.

On my first visit, when I tried a $150 tasting menu with a dearth of culinary highlights but a surfeit of ninja pageantry, they reliably garnished this gesture with loud expectorations of a putative courtesy that sounded more like a rebuke, the phonetic rendering of which would be something along the lines of "Go-mayn!"

"Go-mayn!" coughed a ninja, and onto the table dropped an appetizer of octopus drowned in vinegar. Not soon enough, it was spirited away ("Go-mayn!"), to be replaced and rivaled later on by a wedge of dry black cod in edible paper ("Go-mayn!").

I grew so weary of these syllables that I asked if they could be varied, if something along the lines of a "Surrender, Dorothy!" could be thrown into the mix. I was dead serious.

The lineup of dishes isn't. Presented on a scroll, it mingles straightforward Japanese fare (tempura, sashimi, soba, yakitori) with flights of fancy that are grounded, but only somewhat, in Japanese and French traditions.

In the name of "new style sushi" Ninja employs rice cakes as beds - or sometimes graves - for a rectangle of truffle-flecked omelet (it tasted like soggy French toast), a sliver of sautéed foie gras (pleasant, but how could it not be?) and a finger of seaweed-crowned mackerel (fishy in the extreme).

It trots out a golden tower roll, which inexplicably embeds uni in spongecake, and a spring snow roll, which engulfs eel in an obliterating puck of sweetened cream cheese.

In the service of table-side derring-do the restaurant spotlights what it calls a meteorite pot, a milky brew with Thai seasonings and slices of pork loin. A ninja cooks it in close, sizzling proximity to diners by heaving a large, hot rock into the broth. It's a soup and a sauna, not to mention a pointless effort for the thin, dull outcome.

And in the interest of decadence Ninja concocts appetizers like a "crème brûlée" that combines egg custard with Parmesan, potato, foie gras and veal for a quichelike effect. It was actually good, a judgment that applied to only about a third of the food, much too small a fraction for a restaurant this expensive.

The shoddy service also contradicted the cost. If a restaurant wants to promote six multicourse meals that range from $80 to $200, it should make sure that the menu on which these options appear doesn't have a big red food stain, as a companion's menu did.

Readers Forum: Dining Out

If a restaurant wants to charge between $12 and $18 a glass for white wine and $15 for weak specialty drinks, it should respond to an expressed interest in sake with a presentation of its sake list, not with the words "I'll bring half a liter," which is what a ninja said. It should not run out of sparkling water, as it did one night.

It should also advise its ninjas that it's not nice to brag about having entertained a Hollywood celebrity who, by the account of the ninja in question, was the apparent beneficiary of recent breast augmentation. I was happy for the disclosure and appalled at the indiscretion, as I was at so much else.

A "fatty tuna steak," available à la carte for $45, was no larger than a cutlet, and while I expected o-toro, I detected no toro. Once the bright red bits of shell that decorated a $40 lobster entrée were removed, all that remained was about eight bites of flesh, neither tender nor sweet.

That frog dessert was just $10, but it was little more than a cloying blob of cunningly molded cream cheese. A ho-hum amalgam of chocolate cake, green tea cake and vanilla and green tea ice creams (also $10) was another triumph of shape over substance, resembling a bonsai.

For a toddler with a trust fund and a yen for udon and maki, Ninja might be a valid alternative to the Jekyll and Hyde restaurant.

For just about anybody else it's nonsensical, and its climactic illusion may well be a disappearing act.

Ninja New York

Poor

25 Hudson Street (Duane Street), TriBeCa; (212) 274-8500.

ATMOSPHERE An underground, otherworldly, cavelike maze that spreads over 6,000 square feet, including private dining nooks, and is meant to evoke a Japanese mountain village.

SOUND LEVEL Quiet.

RECOMMENDED DISHES Maki roll of shiitake and shrimp in purple rice; cucumber, shiso and sesame roll; squid ink crackers with foie gras terrine; deep-fried burdock root; egg custard with foie gras and veal.

WINE LIST A limited international selection of relatively high-priced wines, complemented by sake and specialty drinks.

PRICE RANGE Appetizers, $10 to $20; entrees, $20 to $45; à la carte sushi, $6 to $12; maki rolls, $10 to $15; desserts, $10 to $12; tasting menus, $80 to $200 at dinner, $40 to $60 at lunch.

Stalking the Poor to Soothe the Affluent

Stalking the Poor to Soothe the Affluent - New York Times

Editorial
Stalking the Poor to Soothe the Affluent

Published: October 26, 2005

Impoverished Americans are being set up as targets this week in Congress's desperate attempt to find budget cuts after four straight years of tax cuts for the affluent. House Republicans propose harmful cuts in Medicaid access and benefits, while forcing another 10 hours of work from welfare families and giving states free rein to pile more draconian reductions onto the most vulnerable citizens.

This gross political posturing does not even translate into true savings. While imperiously proclaiming cuts of $50 billion over five years, Congressional leaders are determined to fiddle more harmfully with the revenue half of the budget and to pass an additional $70 billion in upper-bracket tax cuts.

The proposals would have the federal government - supposedly the protector of the neediest - give the states broad leeway to restrict current benefits; to require co-payments by the poor for medicine and for care by doctors and emergency rooms; and to cut preventive care for children, who represent half of the Medicaid roll. The food stamp program would probably also be hit with a $1 billion cut, and even welfare payments to elderly people who are sick would be crimped by using federal bookkeeping tricks.

One particularly boneheaded proposal would severely cut the funds for child support enforcement by $4 billion. This program currently returns $4 in benefits from natural parents for every dollar invested.

The proposals are so appalling that moderate Republicans are even said to be considering a show of life on the floor. In contrast, Senate Republicans are shaping cuts that would spare the poor's Medicaid and other safety nets, while finding savings in Medicare overpayments.

The Senate approach is obviously preferable, but it is also rooted in the G.O.P.'s pre-election fiction that overspending is the basic problem. The tax cuts should be scuttled and the poor protected.

#8 Legalized Torture, Reloaded

Legalized Torture, Reloaded

Published: October 26, 2005

Amid all the natural and political disasters it faces, the White House is certainly tireless in its effort to legalize torture. This week, Vice President Dick Cheney proposed a novel solution for the moral and legal problems raised by the use of American soldiers to abuse prisoners and the practice of turning captives over to governments willing to act as proxies in doing the torturing. Mr. Cheney wants to make it legal for the Central Intelligence Agency to do this wet work.

Mr. Cheney's proposal was made in secret to Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican who won the votes of 89 other senators this month to require the civilized treatment of prisoners at camps run by America's military and intelligence agencies. Mr. McCain's legislation, an amendment to the Defense Department budget bill, would ban the "cruel, inhuman and degrading" treatment of prisoners. In other words, it would impose age-old standards of democracy and decency on the new prisons.

President Bush's threat to veto the entire military budget over this issue was bizarre enough by itself, considering that the amendment has the support of more than two dozen former military leaders, including Colin Powell. They know that torture doesn't produce reliable intelligence and endangers Americans' lives.

But Mr. Cheney's proposal was even more ludicrous. It would give the president the power to allow government agencies outside the Defense Department (the administration has in mind the C.I.A.) to mistreat and torture prisoners as long as that behavior was part of "counterterrorism operations conducted abroad" and they were not American citizens. That would neatly legalize the illegal prisons the C.I.A. is said to be operating around the world and obviate the need for the torture outsourcing known as extraordinary rendition. It also raises disturbing questions about Iraq, which the Bush administration has falsely labeled a counterterrorism operation.

Mr. McCain was right to reject this absurd proposal. The House should reject it as well.