Senate panel defies Bush over terror detainees
A rebellious Senate committee is defying President George Bush with its approval of terror-detainee legislation that the US president has vowed to block.
Republicans find the deepened intraparty conflict over terrorism and national security particularly worrisome because it comes in the middle of the election season in which the Republicans plan to campaign on just those subjects as the party’s strong suit.
Republican Sen. John Warner of Virginia, normally a Bush supporter, pushed the measure through his Armed Services Committee by a 15-9 vote, with Warner and three other party mates joining Democrats. The vote set the stage for a showdown on the Senate floor as early as next week.
In an embarrassment to the White House, Colin Powell, Bush’s first secretary of state and the nation’s top general during the first Iraq war, announced his opposition to his old boss’ plan, saying it would hurt the country. Powell’s successor, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, jumped to the president’s defence in a letter of her own.
All this played out after Bush started his day by journeying to the Capitol to try nailing down support for his own version of the legislation and by issuing a threat to the maverick Republicans.
“I will resist any bill that does not enable this programme to go forward with legal clarity,” Bush said at the White House in Washington.
The president’s measure would go further than the Senate package in allowing classified evidence to be withheld from defendants in terror trials, using coerced testimony and protecting CIA and other American interrogators from prosecution for using methods that may violate the Geneva Conventions.
“The world is beginning to doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism,” Powell, a retired general who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the 1991 Iraq war, wrote in his letter.
Powell said Bush’s bill, by redefining the kind of treatment the Geneva Conventions allow, “would add to those doubts. Furthermore, it would put our own troops at risk".
Firing back, White House spokesman Tony Snow said Powell was “confused” about the White House plan. Later, Snow said he probably shouldn’t have used that word.
“I know that Colin Powell wants to beat the terrorists, too,” he said.
The administration also produced its own letter from Rice. She wrote that narrowing the standards for detainee treatment as Bush has proposed “would add meaningful definition and clarification to vague terms in the treaties".
