Posted by
Jay Noble on Wednesday, September 20, 2006 2:23:26 PM
Each day the likelihood grows that the Congress will fail to pass the president's legislation addressing the treatment of captured enemy combatants before the mid-term elections. The principal roadblock is the United States Senate, where Majority Leader Bill Frist admits there is a majority in favor of the McCain/Democrat alternative to the president's approach. The McCain/Democrat Party alliance opposes defining our obligations under Common Article III of the Geneva Convention vis a vis the treatment of captured enemy combatant, i.e., terrorists. Since that approach is unacceptable to the President and a majority of the Republicans in the Senate, who support defining our treaty obligations and protecting legal cover for the men and women of our security services in interrogating the enemy, and less than the 60 senators necessary to break a filibuster back the RINO-Democrat approach, the Senate is deadlocked.
The absurdity and logical incoherence of the McCain/Democrat approach has been demonstrated each time McCain is challenged to explain his position and there is no purpose served in going over it again. What is inexcusable is that a majority of the U.S. Senate worry more about foreign opinion and silly hypotheticals about the possible mistreatment of captured American servicemen than ensuring our security services can effectively interrogate captured terrorists so as to prevent attacks against American cities and citizens. It is inexcusable that the Senate will leave Washington, D.C., without enacting legislation to clarify rules of treatment under Common Article III of the Geneva Contention to protect our operatives from legal jeopardy. It is inexcusable that a Senate majority considers the hypothetical effects on foreign opinion more important than the concrete danger to the American people.
Implicit in the view held by the Democrat senators and McCain is the calculation that the risk to the United States is not so great as to risk the U.S. being unpopular in certain foreign capitals. Only such a belief could sustain arguments that the tactics we employ to protect the national security should be circumscribed by the views of other nations or groups. On the other hand, if you believe, as does the president and a majority of Senate Republicans, that we face an implacable enemy unconcerned with the niceties of international law and the Geneva Convention, possessed of an ideology and corrupted religious faith which embraces the mass murder of innocents an article of faith, and who work assiduously to bring about our death by all means, including weapons of mass destruction, then the first priority is not the feelings of foreign countries about treatment of terrorists we capture but the prevention of mass murder of Americans by effective techniques to secure the information necessary to save lives. If that makes us less unpopular in France or Iran, so be it.
Members of Congress will soon leave Washington to campaign for re-election without acting to protect the American people. Inexcusable.