Simple common sense that the Senators are ignoring in order to play petty political games.
They do so at their peril. This president is dropping the hammer.
"Just the act of locking someone up could be construed as a outrage on human dignity."
The way around this is to take no prisoners. Just saying..
The sad thing is that, for the normal course of war, article 3 isn't really a problem. Normal soldiers are just people doing the bidding of their nations, and when captured they aren't supposed to be held responsible for their leadership. And they aren't supposed to be questioned for intelligence information. They are to be treated with dignity and respect, because they are honorable men fighting for their countries, just as our soldiers are honorable men fighting for our country.
And when the war is over, it doesn't matter that the enemy soldiers had killed american troops, they are sent back to their homes without punishment. And if they are obviously injured and can't fight anymore, they are not to be detained even while the war is going, but sent home immediately. Because again, they are just honorable men fighting for their country.
For some bizarre reason, the Supreme Court decided those same rules had to apply to criminals who violated international law and the geneva convention and the rules of war. Non-enemy combatants who committed and were planning atrocious acts of violence. Never before has the Geneva convention been applied to these people, and now we are stuck because we want to be able to interrogate these criminals, but we have to write a rule that distinguishes between them and the ordinary foot-soldier, and that will be very hard.
Very hard because the Geneva convention already MADE that distinction, and section 3 didn't apply to the terrorists, but the supreme court threw out that distinction, so now we are trying to write a distinction into a section that only applied to normal footsoldiers, and that's very hard to do.
But it can be done, simply by taking the court at their word. Write the rule to distinguish between normal footsoldiers and the people we know the GC didn't apply to, and say we will implement section 3 according to those rules.
Let the Supreme Court come back and tell us that non-enemy combatants HAVE to be treated the same as normal footsoldiers, don't assume we have to do so.
John Warner's complaint when passing his bill through committee was that he didn't want the Supreme Court throwing out a bill, so he wanted to err on the side of caution.
I say, err on the side of right, and let the Supreme Court deal with it. I think we'd win, because Roberts would be allowed to participate, and he would persuade one of the others to vote with him (or maybe better, Stevens might be gone by the time the case came up). We had 3 votes this time, and we know Roberts was on our side because it was HIS court case that was appealed. That's 4, and a couple of the others really sounded like they just wanted the rules clarified, and would be happy to make a distinction between the different classes of prisoners.
So I disagree with my senator strongly.
I also think it's funny that when the house give the president what he wants, and a senate COMMITTEE doesn't, the press says Bush lost. Well, the senate bill goes to the floor, and then there's a conference where it will be changed to the house version, and then we will see if there are 51 votes in the senate to protect terrorists from interrogation. Because if there is only 50 votes, we will win.
Right now, there are 4 republicans on board, and the democrats in the committee. Do we KNOW that Ben Nelson won't be with us, or Joe Leiberman? Isn't it possible that only one more republican will defect?