Cheney Goes RINO-Hunting, Says Detainees Fair Game

From a back-page article in the Sunday New York Times, this jumped out at me:

Vice President Dick Cheney is leading a White House lobbying effort to block legislation offered by Republican senators that would regulate the detention, treatment and trials of detainees held by the American military.

In an unusual, 30-minute private meeting on Capitol Hill on Thursday night, Mr. Cheney warned three senior Republicans on the Armed Services Committee that their legislation would interfere with the president's authority and his ability to protect Americans against terrorist attacks.

The legislation, which is still being drafted, includes provisions to bar the military from hiding prisoners from the Red Cross; prohibit cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment of detainees; and use only interrogation techniques authorized in a new Army field manual.

The three Republicans are John McCain of Arizona, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and John W. Warner of Virginia, the committee chairman. They have complained that the Pentagon has failed to hold senior officials and military officers responsible for the abuses that took place at the Abu Ghraib prison outside of Baghdad, and at other detention centers in Cuba, Iraq and Afghanistan.

The senators could attach their legislation to the $442 billion Pentagon authorization bill for the 2006 fiscal year, which is to be debated on the Senate floor next week. Senate Democrats, led by Carl Levin of Michigan and Jack Reed of Rhode Island, have said they will offer a competing amendment to establish an independent commission, modeled after the 9/11 panel, to investigate detainee abuses and operations.

On Thursday, just before Mr. Cheney's meeting, the White House warned in a blunt statement that Senate approval of a Republican or Democratic amendment was likely to prompt Mr. Bush's top advisers to recommend he veto the measure. . . .

Mr. Cheney's involvement in the issue illustrates the White House's level of concern that the Republican bill could pass.

In January this blog quoted Lindsey Graham, one of the senators we respect most, as follows:

I am a military lawyer . . . And I am very much for the war. I think replacing a dictatorship with a democracy is an important event in the war on terror. But I’ll be honest with you. Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay have hurt us . . .

Fighting aggressively the war on terror . . . and having due process are not inconsistent. . . .

For 60 years, we’ve stood behind the Geneva Convention and the other international protocols protecting combatants, protecting civilians, because we want our people protected and we want the moral high ground. . . . [T]he only way we’re going to win this war is maintain the moral high ground over our enemy.

Dick Cheney disagrees.

- amba

UPDATE: I went to alert Andrew Sullivan to this story and discovered he's already on it:

It beggars belief that, after Abu Ghraib, Bagram, Gitmo and the dozens of deaths in interrogation that the administration wouldn't want some way out of its own impasse. But no: as so often, it sticks its heels in, and refuses to acknowledge an obvious and terrible mistake in the war. I look forward to the hard right describing McCain as a leftist or unpatriotic because he wants to restor America's reputation as a country that acts ferociously but always humanely in its own defense.

Interesting that it's the same people who regard this as a Christian nation who believe that the only effective response to ruthless barbarity is to fight fire with fire.

Comments

[Judy Kratochvil]

The legislation does not interfere with the war on terror it just interferes with the administration's ability to torture the detainees rather than treat them humanely.

Cheney is the administration's arm twister. He needs to be reminded that the Senate has a constitutional duty to perform an oversight function all the time, but especially where it involves war.

[Charlie (Colorado)]

I think we should do exactly what is contemplated in the Geneva Conventions for combatants who aren't associated with an army, don't wear distinguishing uniforms, and attack unarmed civilians: summary execution.

I'm sure you'd feel MUCH better about that, right?

[amba]

Charlie (Colorado),

Summary execution (or torture) for WHOM? Osama, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed -- the known guilty? Or every poor schmuck rounded up in a Baghdad shakedown, with a better than 50% chance of just being in the wrong place at the wrong time?

One problem with such treatment is that it quickly becomes indiscriminate and becomes persecution of many of the innocent.

The other problem is that it drags us down toward our enemies' level, both in the world's estimation and (more importantly) in our own civilization and soul. It becomes not about any values, just about our survival versus theirs. It degenerates and destroys the supposedly superior values we're supposedly fighting to defend.