I welcome the agreement reached on Thursday between the White House and rebellious Republican senators on new rules that will assure that terrorism suspects are questioned within the constraints of the internationally accepted (except by the terrorists) Geneva Conventions on the treatment of POWs and battlefield detainees.
As President Bush said, "I'm pleased to say that this agreement preserves the single most potent tool we have in protecting America and foiling terrorist attacks." This means the president, the CIA and the Defense Department will have the tools they need to prosecute the War on Terror, which we must win. The new agreement prohibits torture, clarifies which interrogation techniques are permissible and establishes trial procedures for terrorism suspects now in U.S. military custody at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Nevertheless, as the New York Times noted, continuing differences between Democrats and Republicans over the treatment of detainees "could have substantial ramifications for national security policy and the political climate heading toward Election Day" on Nov. 7. Could they ever!
Several GOP senators led by John McCain of Arizona, who spent five years in a North Vietnamese POW camp, balked at the president's initial legislative proposals to redefine limits on interrogation techniques under Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions and to modify the U.S. War Crimes Act in order to protect CIA interrogators from prosecution at home and abroad.
McCain was joined by Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John Warner of Virginia, a former Secretary of the Navy, and Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, an experienced attorney (JAG) in the Air Force Reserves, in opposing the president's first proposal. "There's no doubt that the integrity and the spirit of the Geneva Conventions have been preserved," McCain said after the new agreement was announced on Thursday. He added that the compromise "gives the president the tools he needs to continue to fight the War on Terror and bring these evil people to justice."
Although McCain received most of the national media attention in this high-stakes, intra-party squabble, Sen. Graham was a major behind-the-scenes player in the political standoff. Time magazine pointed out that Graham spent part of last summer conducting military law seminars at the Afghan Defense Ministry. "It's important that when the troops act badly, they are punished to keep good order and discipline," he told Afghan military lawyers, "but it's equally important that people believe that the punishment and the (legal) system itself are fair."
As Time reported, "that's pretty much the same argument Graham made back in Washington," much to the chagrin of Bush, Vice President Cheney, high-level White House staffers and GOP leaders in Congress. Graham put the Bush administration on the spot two years ago by demanding high-level military accountability in the sordid Abu Ghraib prison scandal in Iraq. So it's no surprise that the feisty McCain has referred to Graham as "my illegitimate son." But if their goal is to assure that the U.S. lives up to its international obligations in the treatment of detainees and enemy combatants, I think both of them are legitimate.
The problem with reinterpreting provisions of the Geneva Conventions, as Bush had proposed, is that other countries could have done the same thing, endangering captured American troops. Both Bush and the senators wanted to clarify Common Article 3 of the Conventions, which prohibits "outrages upon human dignity," because that vague language leaves military and CIA personnel uncertain about which interrogation techniques they may (and may not) use. Bush and the rebellious senators reached agreement, however, after the White House dropped its insistence on redefining U.S. obligations under the Geneva Conventions. The new rules on interrogating "high value" detainees and terror suspects are absolutely essential because thousands of American lives are at stake.
Military and CIA interrogators must be given the tools they need in order to extract valuable intelligence information from detainees and enemy combatants who are sworn to kill as many Americans as possible. It's important to remember that these detainees aren't garden variety criminals; rather, they're radical Islamic terrorists who use commercial airliners as weapons and who recruit suicide bombers to slaughter women and children. Detainees recently transferred to Guantanamo from secret CIA facilities include planners of the 9/11 terrorist attacks that killed nearly 3,000 innocent civilians in New York and Washington, D.C.
These violent psychopaths clearly don't deserve the same legal rights that are accorded to American citizens who are accused of crimes. But at the same time, we must abide by our international obligations as defined by the Geneva Conventions, which have withstood the test of time. The new agreement does just that, and I'm delighted.
• Guy W. Farmer, a semi-retired journalist and former U.S. diplomat, resides in Carson City.