John said:

Support for the legislation was immediately withdrawn by the Democratic party, League of Women Voters, ACLU, AFL-CIO and many others. So why this change? Is it an act to put in a poison pill to kill the bill or is it a hope that there is enough strength in the bill that it can carry these restrictive, disenfranchising amendments?

I wonder if it would not be more productive simply to oppose the offending amendments on grounds specific to each amendment? That is the way it is done in the House and Senate in DC.

Speaking of votes ... can votes prove or disprove torture ... some (Tenet, CIA) say there has been no torture?

But the House voted (419-7) to pass HR 1678 which amends the "Torture Victims Relief Act". Seven republicans (Burton, IN, Duncan, Flake, Goode, Paul, Rohrabacher, and Sali) voted against the bill.

When it was originally passed in 1998 I do not think that the US was contemplated as a source of torture.

Surely victims of Cheney/Bush torture should also have access to relief. After all, right and wrong is not determined by who is doing it.

RE post #2

What is your vote as to whether or not the following story involves torture:

On a personal note, we've finally decided to leave. I guess I've known we would be leaving for a while now. We discussed it as a family dozens of times. At first, someone would suggest it tentatively because, it was just a preposterous idea- leaving ones home and extended family- leaving ones country- and to what? To where?

Since last summer, we had been discussing it more and more. It was only a matter of time before what began as a suggestion- a last case scenario- soon took on solidity and developed into a plan. For the last couple of months, it has only been a matter of logistics. Plane or car? Jordan or Syria? Will we all leave together as a family? Or will it be only my brother and I at first?

There are moments when the injustice of having to leave your country, simply because an imbecile got it into his head to invade it, is overwhelming. It is unfair that in order to survive and live normally, we have to leave our home and what remains of family and friends… And to what?
...
It's difficult to decide which is more frightening- car bombs and militias, or having to leave everything you know and love, to some unspecified place for a future where nothing is certain.

(Blogger In Baghdad, emphasis added). It seems to be torture to me ... torture in the modern, sophisticated, and civil sense is surely present in the blogger's story.

My vote is that torture does not have to be the kind of brutality that only terrorists use.

I hope torture leaves their lives and I wish the neoCon madmen had not visited torture on them.