Political Maneuvering with the Torture Issue
I thought that in 2005 we had settled the “torture” issue. John McCain broke with the President to introduce legislation that would prohibit the use of cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of prisoners. McCain got broad bipartisan support for his legislation and despite Cheney’s attempts to insert exclusions for the CIA, McCain was successful. Not able to accept this defeat, Bush inserted a signing statement that basically said that he would implement the legislation as he saw fit.
Now we are presented with this issue again. No one should be fooled this time into thinking that this legislation has anything to do with keeping America safer. It’s politics pure and simple. Earlier in the year Karl Rove clearly stated that he would make this election a referendum on which party would keep America safer. True to his plan, the President has supported legislation that allows for certain “alternative” interrogration techniques for prisoners being held by the CIA. Whether or not this legislation passes is probably irrelevant for Bush. The goal here is simply to have Democrats voting against legislation that “keeps America safer.” I wouldn’t be surprised if the commercials were already shot – Congressperson ______ voted against the President’s plan to protect Americans. Can we really trust him/her to keep us safe? Already you are seeing foreign policy being thrown front and center in the political debate. Here’s a recent ad on the wiretapping issue by Nancy Johnson who is running for reelection in Connecticut.
As we saw last week, Bush had miscalculated the Republican opposition to this purely political piece of legislation. Not only did John McCain come out against the legislation, but also Lindsey Graham and John Warner. Colin Powell also was critical of this. Not surprising that a host of ex military officials are the ones who saw the dangers of such legislation. Now some are criticizing McCain saying that his stance on the torture issue will hurt him in his Presidential run. Come on now! If anyone can make an argument about standing up on principle on this issue, it’s John McCain.
The Bush administration may still get its wish to have this purely political legislation come to a vote, but it will have a hard time explaining why the Democrats that stood against the legislation were accompanied by folks like Colin Powell, John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and John Warner.
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Isn’t it fascinating that when Sens. McCain, Warner, and Graham break ranks with George Bush on the issue of torture, the main stream media hail them as “courageous” and “principled”, yet when Democrats oppose the same legislation, for the same reasons, they are consistently characterized in media circles as “weak” and “shrilly partisan”?
I agree wholeheartedly that Rove probably doesn’t care a bit what actually emerges as compromise language on the definition of acceptable “alternative measures” of interrogation, or the procedural ground rules for future military trial tribunals. What Bush and Rove REALLY want (and eventually will probably get, in bipartisan fine print) is the retroactive immunity from criminal prosecution and civil rights civil liability, with a narrowing of judicial review, that is insidiously tucked away in the proposed legislation.
In that sense, it’s not “purely political.” Like the parallel demagoguery over the NSA domestic spying legislation, don’t be suprized to find John McCain and Arlen Spector both holding hands with George Bush in the Rose Garden on the eve of the floor votes, magnanimously congratulating themselves on the virtues of bi-partisan compromise.
Once again, a good number of Dems will be suckered into voting for the final version in the naive belief that this will protect them from being swift boated anyway. Why anybody inside the beltway brain trust of the Democratic Party thinks it is clever electoral strategy to let Republican moderates take the lead on torture (or NSA wiretapping of Americans) is something this Midwesterner cannot fathom. If the Dems political problem is that the public sees they have no program of their own for fighting terrorism, why reinforce that perception in independent voters’ minds by meekly holding John McCain’s coat for him?
Regardless of how it plays out politically, keep your eyes on the fine print. What the White House really wants and needs is the immunity for wrongs and crimes already committed – a fig leaf of Congressional support for the unitary executive branch/wartime Commander-in-Chief legal powers mumbo jumbo that they can shovel into the federal courts for the next couple of years.
Give them that, and they can get away with murder.
Comment on September 21, 2006 @ 2:18 pm