Torture cover-up

President Bush, in Pananma, November 7, 2005: ``Anything we do to that end in this effort, any activity we conduct, is within the law,....We do not torture. And therefore we're working with Congress to make sure that as we go forward, we make it possible, more possible to do our job.''

Headline, Washington Post, November 5, 2005: ''Cheney Seeks CIA Exemption to Torture Ban'':

Vice President Dick Cheney made an unusual personal appeal to Republican senators this week to allow CIA exemptions to a proposed ban on the torture of terror suspects in U.S. custody, according to participants in a closed-door session....

``It was clear to me there that there was a visible audit trail from the vice president's office through the secretary of defense down to the commanders in the field,'' Lawrence Wilkerson, a former colonel who was Secretary of State Colin Powell's chief of staff during President Bush's first term, said Thursday.

Wilkerson said the view of Cheney's office was put in ``carefully couched'' terms but that to a soldier in the field it meant sometimes using interrogation techniques that ``were not in accordance with the spirit of the Geneva Conventions and the law of war.'' He said he no longer has access to the paperwork.

What else do we need to know in order to conclude that there is a major cover-up here? They say they don't torture, but they need an exemption so that they can torture??

If such an exemption were to be written into the McCain-sponsored anti-torture language recently passed by the US Senate, that provision would then do exactly the opposite of outlawing ``cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment'' by codifying an approved exception.