The Senate says no to Mr Bush
Sep 15th 2006
The Senate says even terrorist suspects should face fair trials and no torture

Reuters
FOR A while, George Bush seemed confident of getting his way. In a speech earlier this month he said interrogators of terrorist suspects should be free to use “alternative techniques” to gather information to foil pending plots. Suspects, he added, should be tried in military courts, where defendants enjoy fewer rights than in civilian ones. And his proposal to sign all this into law seemed to be a sharp political move. It helped both to shift attention from troubles in Iraq to the “war on terror” and to make Democrats squirm. If they opposed his plans, they risked seeming soft on terrorism just weeks before mid-term congressional elections.
Mr Bush’s bill would have narrowed the interpretation of the Geneva Conventions, to make those chilling “alternative” techniques legal. These include waterboarding—making a suspect believe he is drowning—and the “cold cell”, when a naked suspect in freezing conditions is repeatedly doused with icy water. It would also have created military commissions where suspects could be tried without seeing the evidence against them.

But a group of Republican senators intervened this week to put a stop to Mr Bush’s plans. The armed-services committee in the Senate did the job. John McCain, himself tortured while a prisoner in Vietnam, was joined by three other Republicans, including the committee’s chairman, John Warner, and all the Democrats present, in forcing Mr Bush’s hand. They also got some surprising outside support. Colin Powell, who served as Mr Bush’s secretary of state, wrote a letter supporting Mr McCain shortly before the vote. He believes that “the world is beginning to doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism.” Last week, the army’s deputy chief of staff for intelligence pointed out what should have been obvious: that that no good information is obtained by torture.
In another curious turn, attention was focused this week on the position of senior military judges. Some of these had recently testified that suspects, in particular those who face the death penalty, must be able to know about (and thus contest) any evidence that is used against them—something Mr Bush’s courts would not allow. But in a sudden reversal this week, the judges sent a short, tame letter to Congress saying that they now “do not object” to Mr Bush’s plans. Washington DC is abuzz with rumours that they were coerced to recant, probably by civilians in the Pentagon.
The House of Representatives had earlier passed a bill closer to Mr Bush’s wishes, but this will now have to be reconciled with a very different Senate version, which is unlikely before elections in November. In any case, Mr Bush had originally not wanted to push through new laws. Suspects at secret CIA prisons in Europe and at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba have already been subjected to waterboarding and the like. And Mr Bush has already set up plans for military tribunals for those in Guantánamo. The administration has been operating as though what it was doing was already legal.
That now seems somewhat in doubt. The Supreme Court has ruled that while terrorist suspects—mainly from the battlefields of Afghanistan—may not have the full rights given in an American domestic criminal trial, they must have some legal process worthy of the name.
Not all is lost with Mr Bush’s anti-terrorism agenda. He made headway with an effort to legalise electronic eavesdropping (without getting a warrant in advance) on international calls and emails. Again, that is something that the administration has confessed to doing already while on shaky legal ground. Congress this week moved closer to supporting the idea. Other democracies’ governments have similar powers, and Americans by and large support it.
Many voters still give Mr Bush the benefit of the doubt on how to fight terrorism. But trust may now be wearing thin, especially after his scrap with Republican grandees in the Senate. He still has plenty of fight in him, but he would surely prefer to do it with the Democrats and not the generals and war heroes of his own party.