Deal reached over detainee interrogations

"B-log"

09/22/2006

Now that the White House and GOP senators have reached agreement, a bill is likely to pass.

Margaret Talev,
McClatchy News Service
Last update: September 21, 2006 – 8:46 PM

WASHINGTON - The White House and dissident Republican senators reached an agreement Thursday that would allow the CIA’s controversial terrorist interrogation program to continue and trials of suspected terrorists to begin but preserve the Geneva Conventions’ prohibitions against mistreating wartime prisoners.

If the compromise is approved by the full Senate and the House before the end of next week, when Congress is set to recess, it could end a weeks-long intra-party rift and unite Republicans around their core national security message as they head into midterm elections.

Final passage of the deal is likely, but hurdles remain.

President Bush sought new authority to question and try suspected terrorists after the Supreme Court ruled in June that his plan for special military tribunals violated both U.S. law and the Geneva Conventions.

Most Democrats and Republicans didn’t yet know the terms of the agreement Thursday. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said he had some concerns about detainees gaining too much access to classified information. The White House and CIA voiced no such concerns, however.

Bush, speaking from a Republican fundraiser in Orlando, said the accord “preserves the ... most potent tool we have in protecting America and foiling terrorist attacks, and that is the CIA program to question the world’s most dangerous terrorists and to get their secrets.”

CIA Director Michael Hayden told his staff in a memo that the agreement would give his operatives “the clarity and the support that we need to move forward.”

Arizona Sen. John McCain, one of four Republican senators who forced the administration to compromise, said he was satisfied with the agreement.

“There is no doubt that the integrity and spirit of the Geneva Conventions have been preserved,” he said at a news conference with other senators and administration officials.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who’d joined McCain, Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, and Armed Services Committee Chairman John Warner, R-Va., in forcing the White House to temper its original proposal, said he believed the compromise would prohibit simulated drowning, or “water-boarding,” as a CIA interrogation technique.

But Graham didn’t rule out other aggressive techniques such as sleep deprivation or playing loud music. He said the legislation wouldn’t spell out which “alternative interrogation techniques” are permitted and which are prohibited.

Specifics were sketchy, as negotiators didn’t immediately release details in writing.

As outlined by lawmakers and administration officials, the deal provides CIA interrogators with protection, retroactive to 2001, against being prosecuted as war criminals for most interrogation methods on high-value detainees.

But the administration appeared to bow to demands from the four Republican senators who had voiced concerns raised by dozens of current and former high ranking military and diplomatic officials, including five former chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Republican Secretaries of State Colin Powell and George Shultz.

The administration had sought to more narrowly define the U.S. obligations under Common Article 3 of the international Geneva Conventions of 1949, which govern the treatment of prisoners of war. Critics said that Bush’s approach could allow interrogation tactics too close to torture, invite other nations to back out of their treaty obligations and possibly lead to torture of U.S. forces in future wars. They also said it would damage the nation’s international reputation by lowering the moral standards that the United States observes in war.

Under the compromise, the administration would agree not to reinterpret the Geneva Conventions. Instead, the U.S. War Crimes Act would be revised to define “grave breaches” of Common Article 3, including murder, torture, biological experiments, rape and other acts.

The CIA would be instructed that it must abide by the Detainee Treatment Act, which was championed last year by McCain and rules out degrading treatment of detainees. But Congress would give the executive branch the power to define a lower category of mid-range felonies under the War Crimes Act.