Sen. Wayne Allard, one of two men Colorado has sent to speak for it in the United States Senate, believes it is perfectly appropriate for our military men and women to torture those they capture on the battlefield. And he is also a proponent of amending our venerable Constitution to prevent two loving people from getting married.
He is not fooling me one bit, though. The rollout of his tired "Marriage Protection Amendment" on Tuesday is simply cover for his sycophantic and all-too-knuckleheaded vote against the McCain Amendment to the defense budget bill. McCain would make it absolutely clear in law that the U.S. does not permit the torture of prisoners.
And we should face down right here what most Coloradans have felt in their gut since that vote: that it was a national embarrassment to have one of our own senators among the nine boot-licking dissenters for the Bush administration.
utterly foolish, now comes Wayne Allard with his old "marriage protection" chestnut. Not even the emboldened, lopsided Republican majority of last year's Senate would get within whiffing distance of the senator's cockeyed amendment.
And perhaps it is just coincidence that he rolled out the amendment at a time when the president's poll numbers suggest he couldn't get elected prom king, when it seems the entire Republican leadership is either indicted or just a phone call to their lawyers away from being so.
He did it on a day when the Pentagon, itself under fire for detainee abuse, issued new directives requiring all interrogation procedures be reviewed at the absolute highest levels.
It comes, too, as The Washington Post reports that the CIA has set up secret prisons in Europe to interrogate terrorism suspects. This is a horrible revelation that prompted two of Wayne Allard's fellow Republican senators not to express outrage, but to demand an inquiry as to who let that particular cat out of the bag.
The question that we as Americans must ask is whether we are willing to sacrifice a large part of what we have always believed in for what we are told are necessary steps to save our mortal backsides.
Wayne Allard has attempted to deflect criticism of his vote by saying that putting restrictions on those who interrogate prisoners simply "ties the hands of the Department of Defense at a time when maximum flexibility within the boundaries of the U.S. law is needed."
All that John McCain, the Republican senator from Arizona, who was a prisoner of war for nearly six years in North Vietnam, asks in his bill is that the U.S. abide by what is called for in the U.S. Army field manual. It doesn't call for prisoners to be tortured.
I remember being in Iraq, just north of Balad, some two years ago when the men and women of the 1st Battalion, Eighth Infantry Regiment captured and brought to the forward operating base, where I was staying, more than two dozen suspected insurgents.
I remember looking into the faces of those men, of how they would not look back. I remember the long rows of mortar and artillery rounds, the rolls of detonation cord, the stacks of plastic explosives and remote detonation devices that were arrayed not far away.
how the Army officers in charge that day virtually threatened physical harm to me and Rocky photographer Todd Heisler if we were to take pictures of the captives, how it was against the Geneva accords.
I also remember a time last spring when, back in Iraq, soldiers seemed to be learning that the rules had changed - that they were not liberators so much as men to be feared.
There was a pride that day two years ago that Americans were not like those who we now fear so. The pride was that, as we fight them, we have not become like them.
Soldiers still say this, in telephone calls and Internet messages that filter back, that even as their fellow soldiers die or are put on Medevacs with limbs missing, they personally restrain themselves from seeking the revenge they desperately want.
And with his anti-gay-marriage silliness, he only distracts from the real debate, the one that ought to be held to find a solution to this disaster of our own making, a solution that will allow our men and women to come home.
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