When the torture bill was being considered, several Demoocrats tried to force it to at least be honest, if it couldn't be right. Ted Kennedy, co-sponsored by Hillary Clinton and Dianne Feinstein introduced an amendment "[t]o provide for the protection of United States persons in the implementation of treaty obligations." This would add some text to the bill saying that the US demands that our citizens be treated humanely by other nations. The Senate Republicans voted it down. Following is the entire text which would have been added:

A lot of the effort that has gone into analyzing the psychology of the Republican corruption machine and the Democratic failure machine seems to me to be missing a key point: each party's structure is floundering because it is in a position for which it wasn't designed. For forty years, the Republicans were the minority party, and their psychology, practices, and organization were designed with that in mind. Likewise, many of the upper-echelon Democrats are still operating with a majority-party mindset.