A torturous compromise
JOHN MCCAIN and two other Republican senators rebelled last week against President Bush's bid to pass rules for interrogating and trying terrorism suspects that violate the Geneva Conventions, but the senators have now agreed to a compromise that leaves the conventions on life support at best. Under the deal struck Thursday, the Geneva rules on abusive interrogations are not formally rewritten. Yet Bush -- who undercut McCain's own 2005 anti torture law with a signing statement -- is granted the right, an aide said, to permit methods that he will not have to disclose.
One of the three senators, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, says he thinks the compromise will forbid the use of ``waterboarding," or simulated drowning, but that's not certain. Unless Congress wants to set a precedent for other countries to use in mistreating US troops in future conflicts, it should insist that interrogations be conducted in accordance with the Army's field manual and that any special trial commissions use the military's court-martial procedures, which are sound.
The three senators did win one significant concession: The administration agreed not to use classified evidence that the suspects cannot see themselves. Declassified summaries of classified material would be shown both to jurors and the suspect. But even this provision might not survive negotiations with the House of Representatives, whose Republican leaders would allow the use of classified evidence a suspect cannot see.
Another point of dispute between the president and the three senators was the use in court of testimony provided under coercion. Thursday's agreement forbids evidence obtained by torture, but it would permit judges to let some coerced testimony into court.
Both the senators' bill and Bush's would deny suspects a centuries-old bulwark of due process: the right under habeas corpus to go to court to challenge continued detention.
Bush and the senators have sought to codify new procedures for detainees because the Supreme Court ruled in June that treatment of terrorism suspects must comply with US law and the Geneva Conventions. Under the conventions' Common Article 3, all detainees -- not just uniformed prisoners of war -- have the legal rights ``recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples." The compromise struck by Bush and the senators falls short of that standard on one count after another.
After delaying legal action against hundreds of detainees for almost five years, the administration should work with Congress to devise interrogation and trial rules that civilized peoples expect. Otherwise, there is every chance that the Supreme Court will again strike down the shortcuts favored by the election-minded leaders in the White House and Congress.
