By Brigitte L. Nacos
The editorial in today’s Washington Post got it
right: “The Abuse [of detainees] Can Continue: Senators won’t authorize
torture, but they won’t prevent it.” The much hailed rebellion of several
Republican Senators against the administration’s push for legislation that
would have reinterpreted the Geneva Convention with respect to interrogation
methods was whipped in line during a long session in Vice President Cheney’s
Capitol Hill office. While the compromise legislation will not rewrite parts of
the Geneva Convention, it will not prevent the President from doing so in an
executive order. After the so-called compromise was reached, Mr. Bush and his aides
made clear that they would indeed go the executive order route. In other words,
the President and his legal advisers in the Justice Department, who have
approved torturous interrogation methods in the past, will continue to decide
how the CIA can press suspected terrorists to reveal information.
John McCain, Lindsay Graham and John Warner who led the
moral rebellion against the President and his administration did not admit to
selling out but rather claimed victory with Senator McCain assuring, as the Washington Post reported, that the
word and the spirit of the Geneva Convention had been preserved. True with
respect to the legislation—but untrue regarding the failure of the “rebels” and
their colleagues to craft a bill that would explicitly prevent the
administration from reinterpreting the Geneva Convention in favor of
“aggressive interrogation” methods.
Now John McCain can have it both ways on one more issue in
his quest for the presidential nomination in 2008: He can tell Bush’s die hard
supporters that he found a compromise with the White House on the treatment of
detainees and he can assure Bush's critics that he stands up to the President, when it counts.
That much for Senators McCain, Graham and Warner as the
harbingers of a new independence party and new moral force in American politics
and columnist David Broder's wishful thinking (see my previous post).
Democrats, who had left the opposition against torture and other detainee issues to Republicans, showed no signs of changing their "do nothing" tactic, when the “rebels” gave up their fight. The Democratic leader in the Senate, Harry Reid, did not criticize the “compromise” but remarked that “Five years after September 11, it is time to make the touch and smart decisions to give the American people the real security they deserve.”
Since the Democrats do not even stand up to be counted on
such serious issues, whose “tough and smart decisions” could he have meant?
His Republican colleagues’? The President’s?
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