Good evening. Greenwald was discussing the domestic applicability of the UN Convention Against Torture on the Bush administration. The convention, which Reagan signed and presented to the Senate in 1988 and was ratified in 1990 (Yes, once upon a time Republicans opposed torture! St. Reagan no less. Though I read somewhere he had loaded it down with reservations that probably gutted any real utility of the thing, but I disgress).
I mention this because it turns out the Senate, in ratifying the treaty, explicitly declared that sections 1-14 of the treaty were not "self-executing." This means that despite the provision of the constitution declaring ratified treaties to be "law of the land," the treaty had no force in domestic law until Congress enacted legislation in the US code to put force behind it.
This took 4 years, and was done as part of the Foreign Relations Authorizations Act of 1994. That one was presented by Lee Hamilton in the House. However, there was at least one earlier effort to implement the CAT, by Biden; I present section 1901 of the Biden-Thurmond Justice Improvements Act, aka S.3349, introduced in October 1992. As far as I can tell, Biden's text substantively matches Hamilton's, so I think it's a fair guess that Hamilton just reused it. Biden (or maybe Thurmond but I somehow doubt it) wrote the law implementing the United States' International committment against torture. Fascinating. Mr. Vice President, are you going to leave a law you wrote unenforced at its moment of truth?
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