New detainee legislation passes
Congress yesterday passed the new bill on Detaining Terrorists. It's often hard to read through all the revisions and descriptions of compromises, so I thought that it would be useful to synopsize the major points:
Woof.
At some level, the President is right. The Geneva Convention does need to change, because terrorists are not armed combatants. They play by different rules and we must, too.
However, this bill is a mistake. We should have taken this issue to the UN first or at least created a new Nato-like consortium of countries that could all jointly decide how they would deal with terrorist suspects. By doing this John Wayne-style, we have invited wholesale improvising of prisoner treatment by all countries. The only reason that we would have a special right to do so unilaterally would be because we can kick everyone else's ass--a relevant sentiment at some points in the world's history, but I would have thought less so today.
We Americans will regret this bill. Hopefully the Supreme Court will strike it down next year as unconstitutional. If not, perhaps the November election will be Viagra to the largely impotent Democratic Legislature and newly empowered, they will reverse then what they have wrought today, before a single US soldier is tied to a chair in a foreign country and interrogated as a "terrorist".
Posted on September 29, 2006
