NOTE: Due to the importance of this story we’ll keep this post at the top of this site for some of the day. There are NEWER posts below — so keep scrolling.
News that several high-profile Republican Senators who had stalled President George Bush’s intent to give a legislative green-light to tough interrogation — some say “torture” — of terrorist suspects means a key stumbling block to GOP unity going into the November elections has been removed.
But it’s also likely to mean the issue more than ever will be on thefront burner in the mid-term election battles, it could impact the images of several key players in this political drama and international criticism of the United States will likely heighten.
You can just see the gathering storm clouds as you read the news accounts of what seems to be the end of a political storm.
The White House and dissident Senate Republicans reached a tentative accord yesterday on legislation that President Bush said would provide for continued tough interrogations of terrorism suspects by the CIA at secret detention sites.
The accord, which includes a plan for future military trials of alleged terrorists, also spells out rules for the use of classified evidence as well as information obtained through coercion of some detainees.
While the deal is subject to further discussion with House Republican leaders, it resolved the most contentious issues in the Bush administration’s high-profile drive to gain congressional backing for its detainee policies before Congress adjourns next week. It also could help settle an intraparty fracas that worried GOP leaders in the run-up to the November elections.
Both sides declared that they had achieved their aims. Bush hailed the accord in a brief televised appearance from Orlando. He said the deal preserved “the CIA program to question the world’s most dangerous terrorists and to get their secrets.” CIA Director Michael V. Hayden told the agency in a statement that “if this language becomes law, the Congress will have given us the clarity and the support that we need to move forward with a detention and interrogation program.”
“Both sides” here means GOPers. The Democrats may be split over this issue and one segment of the Democratic party will consider this compromise no compromise at all.
And those Democrats who distrust both Bush and Arizona Senator John McCain are likely to view the agreement with intense distrust:
“I’m pleased to say that this agreement preserves the single most potent tool we have in protecting America and foiling terrorist attacks,� the president said, shortly after administration officials and key lawmakers announced agreement following a week of high-profile intraparty disagreement.
Sen. John McCain of Arizona, one of three GOP lawmakers who told Bush he couldn’t have the legislation the way he initially asked for it, said, “The agreement that we’ve entered into gives the president the tools he needs to continue to fight the war on terror and bring these evil people to justice.�
“There’s no doubt that the integrity and letter and spirit of the Geneva Conventions have been preserved,� McCain said, referring to international agreements that cover the treatment of prisoners in wartime.
Reuters adds these details:
A deal reached on rules for the questioning and trials of suspected terrorists held by the United States would put some limits on the suspects’ access to evidence, a White House official said on Thursday.
“A provision dealing with classified evidence makes sure that no sensitive intelligence will have to be shared with terrorists or their lawyers,” White House national security adviser Stephen Hadley told reporters.
This will likely spark a debate over whether what the government says is classified really is classified or whether the government is taking a advantage of its power to use it as a tool to circumvent legal protections.
The Guardian in Great Britain:
After a week-long standoff which had frustrated Republican plans to present a united strategy on the war on terror in the November mid-term elections, White House officials and senators yesterday said they had arrived at a compromise. Details were not immediately available, but it was thought Mr Bush had dropped his demand for a bill to loosen America’s commitment to the Geneva conventions, which prohibit torture of prisoners. In return, the senators are believed to have agreed to the White House demand to clarify what would constitute a war crime.
McClatchy Newspapers says both sides genuinely gave a few things up to come up with a compromise:
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who’d joined McCain and Armed Services Committee Chairman John Warner, R-Va., in forcing the White House to temper its original proposal, said he believed the compromise would prohibit simulated drowning, or “water-boarding” as a CIA interrogation technique.
But Graham didn’t rule out other aggressive techniques such as sleep deprivation or playing loud music. He said the legislation wouldn’t spell out which “alternative interrogation techniques” are permitted and which are prohibited….
….As outlined by lawmakers and administration officials, the deal provides CIA interrogators with protection, retroactive to 2001, against being prosecuted as war criminals for most interrogation methods on high-value detainees.
But the administration appeared to bow to demands from McCain, Graham and Warner, who’d voiced concerns raised by dozens of current and former high ranking military and diplomatic officials, including five former chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Republican Secretaries of State Colin Powell and George Shultz.
The administration had sought to more narrowly define the U.S. obligations under Common Article 3 of the international Geneva Conventions of 1949, which govern the treatment of prisoners of war. Critics said that Bush’s approach could allow interrogation tactics too close to torture, invite other nations to back out of their treaty obligations and possibly lead to torture of U.S. soldiers in future wars. They also said it would damage the nation’s international reputation by lowering the moral standards America observes in war.
Under the compromise, the administration would agree not to reinterpret the Geneva Conventions. Instead, the U.S. War Crimes Act would be revised to define “grave breaches” of Common Article 3, including murder, torture, biological experiments, rape and other acts.
The CIA would be instructed that it must abide by the Detainee Treatment Act, which was championed last year by McCain and rules out degrading treatment of detainees. But Congress would give the executive branch the power to define a lower category of mid-range felonies under the War Crimes Act.
The administration appeared to accept the senators’ demand that classified information couldn’t be used to convict a detainee unless the detainee was given at least a sense of what information was being used against him. The sources and methods of U.S. intelligence would be protected.
The senators also appeared to get most of what they wanted in terms of allowing a judge to throw out evidence that appeared to have been gleaned in violation of humane treatment standards.
This issue — and story — seems like it’s only just beginning:
THE REPUBLICANS (unless something unravels) now are poised to try and make national security the issue. The implication (not too subtly stated at times) is that the U.S. will be less safe if the Democrats are allowed to regain one or more chambers of Congress. They will try to force the Democrats to vote for against a proposal and define them in the elections. The GOP’s problem has been firing up its disappointed base so they’ll get out and vote. Polls show Bush is winning his base back.
THE DEMOCRATS must now decide how to respond on this issue. In two major elections the GOP has had votes months before the vote that forced Democrats to take a stand and the stand was successfully used as a wedge issue agains them in the elections. The Democratic party must also fire up its base but it runs the risk in doing so that it could cause more Republicans to go out and vote to counter the Democratic turnout. Some GOP analysts have said over the past week that Bush was setting a trap for Democrats. If so, will they react the way Bush (and Karl Rove) anticipate? Or will they adopt an alternate strategy? and, if so, will this anger key parts of the Democratic base?
JOHN MCCAIN’S POSITION will be fascinating to watch. Did he lose some independents by the compromise? Was his holding out and forcing a compromise enough to undo all the fence-mending he has done in recent years to become the GOP front runner in 2008? Or will Americans welcome his role in a compromise that softens the White House’s original mega-tough approach?
THE US STANDING IN THE WORLD could be impacted. Will other countries now feel that they, too, have the right to alter their interpretation of the Geneva Conventions…even a little bit, but enough to change its longstanding interpretation?
Look for the GOP to move full-gear in its move to make 2006 a vote on whether Americans really want to change political horses midstream in the terrorism war (a war that could last for decades) as Democrats point to an array of flaws in Bush’s and the GOP’s record over the past 6 years.
On this issue the question again becomes: is the U.S. fundamentally changing its character as nation? Is it regrettable or vital that it do so? The political story here remains the continued new battleground of American politics: it’s no longer winning over the center but firing up members of the base of each party so they angrily go to the polls to keep the other party out.
Which party will get more fired up over this compromise — and will one party overreach and suffer in the Congressional mid-terms by its conduct after this compromise?
Which ones will offend Americans first — and lose the debate (and elections)?
UPDATE I: The New York Times has a stinging editorial:
Here is a way to measure how seriously President Bush was willing to compromise on the military tribunals bill: Less than an hour after an agreement was announced yesterday with three leading Republican senators, the White House was already laying a path to wiggle out of its one real concession.
About the only thing that Senators John Warner, John McCain and Lindsey Graham had to show for their defiance was Mr. Bush’s agreement to drop his insistence on allowing prosecutors of suspected terrorists to introduce classified evidence kept secret from the defendant…
…..The Democrats have largely stood silent and allowed the trio of Republicans to do the lifting. It’s time for them to either try to fix this bill or delay it until after the election. The American people expect their leaders to clean up this mess without endangering U.S. troops, eviscerating American standards of justice, or further harming the nation’s severely damaged reputation.
And so does the Washington Post:
But the senators who have fought to rein in the administration’s excesses — led by Sens. McCain, Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) and John W. Warner (R-Va.) — failed to break Mr. Bush’s commitment to “alternative” methods that virtually every senior officer of the U.S. military regards as unreliable, counterproductive and dangerous for Americans who may be captured by hostile governments.
Mr. Bush wanted Congress to formally approve these practices and to declare them consistent with the Geneva Conventions. It will not. But it will not stop him either, if the legislation is passed in the form agreed on yesterday. Mr. Bush will go down in history for his embrace of torture and bear responsibility for the enormous damage that has caused.
HERE IS A CROSS SECTION OF OTHER VIEWS:
—The Talking Dog, who has done a lot of original question and answer interviews on the issues of detainees and torture:
I have a pretty good idea what the bills are about (stripping jurisdiction from federal courts to hear habeas corpus writs, and ostensibly trying to provide the dictatorial tools Cheney wants by Congressional rubber stamping what John Yoo had previously told the President he could do by “unitary executive” fiat)… they are about denying any semblance of a fair trial to terror suspects, they are about wink-winking to torture carried out by the CIA, and mostly, they are about trying to remove judicial oversight from any of this, because the Bush Administration figures it will make some lemonade out of the lemons handed to it by the Supreme Court in the Hamdan case….
…The amazing thing is that the Democrats could have shown some backbone, and basically taken a chance at showing some principle, and it would have helped them in November. Instead, Chuck Schumer, Harry Reid and the gang (pricks) were content to hang their hats on the good will of Republican Presidential candidate John McCain. Good move, Chuck. As interviewee after interviewee tells me, it’s not as if the Democrats aren’t already perceived as soft on national security; the thing is, they are also seen as craven, opportunistic and without principles. And now, without firing a shot, the Democrats have not only reinforced those perceptions, but have helped both McCain and Bush to solidify their own positions (indeed, now that whole October surprise thing might not even be necessary…) And they’ve helped to legalize torture and star chamber tribunals. In short, way to go.
—Powerline:”According to the AP, one aspect of the deal is that the deal is that the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 will not be used to define the U.S.’s obligations under the Geneva Convention. Which means that McCain refused to accept his own language as the definition of proper treatment of terrorists. Seems odd, doesn’t it?”
—Emboldened:
I believe strongly that the law that results from this compromise will enable the administration to indulge in many of its fetishistic anti-terror techniques. The Supreme Court has already suggested that we should be ashamed of ourselves for our conduct, and now we’ve codified it. In the end, the Republicans who sat down at the table with the administration made the fundamental error of thinking a compromise with this administration would yield a just resolution. Somewhere they forgot that a compromise between a democracy and a dictatorship will not result in a democracy.
Democrats are whining that they have been had again. Well, yes indeed, you have been had once again. I just sort of figured you would have seen that one coming. Guess not. Although, I will give you your one valid point. You do look like crap, but that happens when you side with those who are trying to convert/kill all of us.
George W. Bush compromised to get his deal legalizing torture: he won’t get to rewrite the Geneva Conventions. But he does get to legalize torture. Republicans must be so proud. No one can utter the word “Geneva”. Bravo. Torture and speech all in one, but when you throw in allowing secret evidence you’ve got an anti-American trifecta. Well done….
…As is already happening, Bush is being pronounced the winner because the Democrats never showed up for the fight. Why? You can talk about the politics of torture all you want, but the bottom line is that they placed a very bad bet on John McCain. Sometimes wait and see how things play out just ends up looking like you’re weak. Ask John Kerry how it worked out for him during the Swiftboat vet onslaught.
I disagree with the 3 senators on this. I have been a proponent of torture for some time. I do not like torture, but it fits with my policy of doing what is necessary to our enemies to protect our people. As long as the victims of torture do not at any time enter US soil, I feel it is OK to allow Presidental approved torture of the highest level terrorists – because getting what they know is more important than the Geneva Convention. They would torture our soldiers if they had the chance. They would torture our people if they had the chance….
…Though I disagree with them on this issue, and agree with the President, our government is based on checks and balances and on the ability to compromise. Though the Democrats have forgotten how to compromise, it is nice to see that some Republicans at least still have this ability. And any bill on terrorist interrogation, provided it at least has some of the presidents’s proposals, is much better then having no bill at all.
I was visiting somebody and they had FoxNews on. Turns out the “detailsâ€? of the agreement are “secretâ€? so as to not tip off al-Qaida so they can train their terr’ists on the interrogation techniques being used. Okay, so this proves it all – this was nothing more than a PR move for the GOP and an attempt to make Senator McCain appear “Presidentialâ€?. Well it didn’t work. Senator McCain STILL appears to me to be the ONLY person less desireable than Senator Hillary Roddham Clinton for the Presidency….[Republican]“Rebelsâ€? indeed… how about “GOP pillowfighting veteransâ€? instead…..
—Tom Maguire:”I’ll provide one detail – since Dems have been hiding behind St. John on this issue, they will have a hard time announicng at this late date that McCain lacks the integrity and judgment to be trusted. And another detail – whether this is a victory for Bush or McCain, it is not a victory for Harry Reid and the Senate Dems.”
—Steve Soto:
But the real reason Bush is jumping at this or any deal right now is because the Agency has suspended its interrogations of detainees until Congress gives them a get-out-of-jail free card through this legisation. And with no interrogations going on, Bush feels he is flying blind, not that much if anything was coming from these “interviews”. So it became imperative for Bush to get anything at all from Congress that dealt with defining unlawful methods, and he probably feels he’ll deal with the issue of habeus corpus after the midterms.
All I can say to John McCain is you had better get language in this that bars Bush from issuing a signing statement to undermine it again.
I really wanted to excerpt a John McCain of Lindsey “Wagner” Graham quote, but there really isn’t anything striking about their remarks. Graham insists he was only really ever concerned about the use of classified information. McCain made some general remarks about how this bill ensures a President has the tools he needs.
Which is revealing, in and of itself. Their quotes don’t exactly sound triumphalist.Which, in DC speak, means they lost.
One thing to watch out for is whether this will be the same template used in the warrantless eavesdropping context – namely, that the “maverick, dissident, independent Republicans” who are “fighting” against the White House suddenly reach a “compromise” with the Bush administration that is slightly short of the Specter bill but nonetheless gives the White House virtually everything it wants – including legalizing warrantless eavesdropping on Americans with full discretion.
Then, Republicans dramatically join together as One and celebrate the victory they won in the war on terror, creating the appearance that they compromised, all while remaining tough-on-terrorism and protective of our civil liberties, while Democrats sit quietly and meekly on the sidelines, invisible, irrelevant and impotent.
—Multi Medium:”John McCain is Arlen Specter with panache, plus the adoration of the media. They’ll both talk a good game about holding the administration in check, and then hand them everything they want on a silver platter under the fig leaf of “compromise.” Lord, deliver us from false moderates.”
—Hanlon’s Razor:
So here’s my question to you fellows out there in InternetLand: no matter how the United States defines the Geneva Conventions, doesn’t that mean the rest of the world can still accuse us of War Crimes? Can any country define for itself how to interpret the articles and thus be immune from the rest of the world’s opinion?
As an international agreement, couldn’t the other countries of the UN still say “hey, no� and bitchslap the United States no matter what the US law says? I have no idea myself.
I have a good friend who has maintained for quite some time that the “Democrats could still screw this up” — referring, of course, to the 15 point generic lead that they’re still enjoying in the polls, less than seven weeks from Election Day. Sure enough…
…90% of politics, to paraphrase Woody Allen, is just showing up. Yet what is abundantly clear — once again! — is that too many Democratic candidates, mollified into complacency by generic polling (“Let’s just let the other guy implode!”), have failed to show up and offer an alternative vision. And so we end up with the McCain-Bush shell game of more militarism and less moralism — because very few Democrats in Washington (if any) bothered to show up and speak up. And so — not incidentally — the generic lead begins to evaporate.
It appears most of the backing down was done by McCain. In the past week the Arizona senator had watched his presidential aspirations evaporate as his political posturing collided with reality on this issue.
We will now have unequal protection under the law. If you’re the potential target of an Iraqi IED (that would include Iraqi civilians and deployed US military personnel), your would-be killer is most likely to be captured by the US military and treated with kid gloves. The rest of us, targets of “international terrorists,� are granted some additional protection by more powerful CIA interrogations. So much for supporting the troops.
—Ron Beasley:”Now since Bush does not compromise and McCain has a recent history of giving in it is probably safe to assume that Bush got most of what he wants. It may be that people are beginning to see through McCain; the New York Times/CBS poll today indicated that Hillary Clinton now has a higher approval rating than John McCain – 32% to 28%.”
—Daily Kos:
Torture is at the heart of this program and is what the administration has been fighting for since the Supreme Court handed down Hamdan. What’s more, Frist’s statement makes clear that the Uniform Code of Militart Justice, which guarantees that defendants have the right to see the evidence against them, is going to be gutted in this “compromise.”
That’s no compromise, all you “principled” GOP rebels. It’s capitulation. Lay down your much vaunted “integrity” and take up your Rubber Stamps.
The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as “keeping out of politics.” All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer…
…I intend to study very closely the language of the Senate deal on “alternative interrogation techniques” before commenting.
—Legal Fiction has a DETAILED analysis of the language in the original Bush bill, McCain bill, and the compromise that is a must read. Conclusion:”I’m still looking over everything, and it looks like the McCain faction (sadly, but unsurprisingly) surrendered. What jumps out at me in looking it over was the amount of power and discretion Congress just handed over to the Executive. Anyway, it’s easy to get lost in all this, but I think once you put the pieces together, it’s pretty clear that this bill is a systematic effort to authorize cruel interrogation measures and then shield them from prosecution.”
—Balkinization also has a detailed legal analysis that MUST be read in FULL. A very small part of it:
What’s worse, such physical injury would also have to “involve” at least one of the following:
(1) a substantial risk of death;
(2) extreme physical pain;
(3) a burn or physical disfigurement of a serious nature, not to include cuts, abrasions, or bruises; or
(4) significant loss or impairment of the function of a bodily member, organ, or mental faculty.
As you can see, this definition simply does not cover many categories of actual serious physcial suffering, including, naturally, the physical suffering that ordinarily results from the CIA techniques that have been reported.
The result, unfortunately, is a very constrained conception of what constitutes “cruel treatment” — a much narrower conception than a fair or reasonable interpretation of Geneva Article 3(1)(a) would provide.
Where does that leave Democrats? McCain’s endorsement leaves them twisting in the wind. They have built him up as the conscience of the GOP for the last two years, especially on the topic of torture, due to their perception of him as a gadfly to the White House. Having established his credibility on the subject, they will find themselves ill prepared to gainsay him on his own negotiated settlement for interrogations.
If the Democrats are smart, they will just let the legislation pass quickly through Congress. They have seen the Republicans rise from the dead in the polls approaching the midterms, and it doesn’t take a mathematician to put two and two together on the effect the national security debate has had on their fortunes. Opposing a program that has saved America from eight separate terrorist plots with some belly-slapping and loud music will not convince voters that the Democrats will keep the nation safe during a time of war. They should keep the focus on Iraq, rather than give Bush any more opportunities to remind the nation that the same programs that kept terrorists from attacking us will disappear with a Democratic Congress.
—Kevin Drum at Washington Monthly:”More careful analysis of the compromise language is probably needed, but at this point it looks like the three Republican “moderates” gave in completely. If that’s the case, the only question remaining is whether this was all staged from the beginning to put Democrats in an impossible position, or if they genuinely caved in on practically every detail. Stay tuned for more on that.”
—The Peking Duck:
And by forcing the Congress to vote on it shortly before the elections, it becomes a litmus test of whether you are loyal to America. This is political cynicism at its very best, and it is a brilliant example of how Bush-Rove stage-manage elaborate stunts to create a powerful image, whether it’s on an aircraft carrier or the Senate floor. Republicans – strong, virile and reasonable. Democrats – cowardly, disorganized, weak. Sure, we all know it’s a trick, an illusion. But it makes me increasingly terrified that the GOP is about to make a sensational comeback and hold onto the House. In fact, until I’m convinced otherwise, until I see the Dems take back the microphone and start getting their own messages out, I am officially predicting a Republican upset. They will win in November.
—Josh Marshall:”The senate won’t formally reinterpret the Geneva Convention or explicitly sanction the president’s torture policies. But they’ll allow him to keep using them. That’s the compromise. The senate, in this dance, becomes the United States ‘rendering’ prisoners to the executive for illicit torture much as the US renders folks to Syria and Egypt we when really want them to get the treatment. Or maybe it’s like Pilate washing his hands?”
—Riehl World View:
It’s amazing when you think about it, that a political ideology would seem so intent on bringing on its own demise by giving a dangerous and unprincipled enemy a free pass – but that’s Liberalism, folks. No doubt their feeling tortured tonight by the compromise. Now all the Dems have to do is try to block it and they will solidify their image as soft on terror. And the netroots will torture them if they don’t take a strong stand.
Poor Dems, they probably thought they’d be cruising toward control of both Houses righht about now. Instead they are wringing their hands wondering how to get elected without letting people know what they really believe. At least for today, political life is sweet for conservatives. But will it last? Time will tell.
Now that a deal has been struck on the interrogation issue, the Moose recommends that the Democrats say “amen” and move on. The last thing in the world the Democrats should do is allow the GOP to portray them as weak on getting information from Jihadists. And as the Democrats learned in the 2002 debate over the labor provision in the Homeland Security Department legislation, such a security fight before an election can be politically disastrous, if not suicidal.
Democrats need to listen less to the nutroots and reconnect with their own roots – the heritage of Truman, JFK and Scoop.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.