McCain's Sins of Military Commission
On the stump in New Jersey today, John McCain launched a thundering two-pronged assault on yesterday's Supreme Court decision on habeas corpus rights for detainees held at Guantanamo Bay. Again raising the specter of "unaccountable judges," McCain picked up on his earlier, right-wing handbook assault against so-called judicial activism. Then turning to fear-mongering, McCain proclaimed "one of the worst decisions in the history of this country" will lead to more attacks against the American people. But lost in McCain's red-faced response is his effort to whitewash his own past role in undermining both the Constitution and the Geneva Conventions.
Expanding on his predictable response Thursday, John McCain today went full-throttle in hopes of making the Bush administration's detainee program a campaign issue. And to be sure, McCain stressed his own role in crafting the Military Commissions Act and Detainee Treatment Act rebuked by the Supreme Court yesterday:
"The United States Supreme Court yesterday rendered a decision which I think is one of the worst decisions in the history of this country. Sen. Graham and Sen. Lieberman and I had worked very hard to make sure that we didn't torture any prisoners, that we didn't mistreat them, that we abided by the Geneva Conventions, which applies to all prisoners. But we also made it perfectly clear, and I won't go through all the legislation we passed, and the prohibition against torture, but we made it very clear that these are enemy combatants, these are people who are not citizens, they do not and never have been given the rights that citizens of this country have.
And my friends there are some bad people down there. There are some bad people. So now what are we going to do. We are now going to have the courts flooded with so-called, quote, Habeas Corpus suits against the government, whether it be about the diet, whether it be about the reading material."
Unfortunately for McCain, his reading of recent American history doesn't comport with the facts. In 2005 and 2006, John McCain was complicit in both undermining the Geneva Conventions and in yielding to President Bush's regime of torture.
In the wake of the Supreme Court's June 2006 Hamdan decision striking down the military tribunal system then in place, President Bush and his Congressional allies rushed to enact the Military Commissions Act in advance of the fall mid-term elections. Giving President Bush alone the ability by executive order to interpret the Geneva Conventions, the MCA not only denied detainees access to federal courts, but declared:
"No alien unlawful enemy combatant subject to trial by military commission under this chapter may invoke the Geneva Conventions as a source of rights."
As Cliff Schecter details in his book The Real McCain, Mr. Straight Talk offered anything but in lauding what Congress had done in the Military Commissions Act. On September 28, 2006, McCain declared Geneva had been preserved after all:
"Simply put, this legislation ensures that we respect our obligations under Geneva, recognizes the President's constitutional authority to interpret treaties, and brings accountability and transparency to the process of interpretation by ensuring that the executive's interpretation is made public. The legislation would also guarantee that Congress and the judicial branch will retain their traditional roles of oversight and review with respect to the President's interpretation of non-grave breaches of Common Article 3."
It's no wonder the Washington Post took McCain to task in the fall of 2006 for his Orwellian double-speak:
In short, it's hard to credit the statement by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) yesterday that "there's no doubt that the integrity and letter and spirit of the Geneva Conventions have been preserved." In effect, the agreement means that U.S. violations of international human rights law can continue as long as Mr. Bush is president, with Congress's tacit assent.
As it turns out, John McCain similarly gave his tacit assent to President Bush regime of torture the previous year. After all, it was President Bush's December 30, 2005 signing statement on McCain's amendment to the Detainee Treatment Act that made waterboarding and other acts of torture the continuing policy of the United States.
Bush, of course, had opposed John McCain's torture bill throughout the fall of 2005. But when the House and Senate passed McCain's amendment to the defense authorization bill by veto proof margins, Bush held a December 15 press conference with McCain, announcing his support for the language explicitly saying that that the cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of detainees in US custody is illegal regardless of where they are held.
As the Boston Globe reported, that supposed compromise lasted just as long as it took for President Bush to issue his signing statement two weeks later on December 30. When it comes to what constitutes "cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of detainees," the President proclaimed that he indeed would be the decider.
The executive branch shall construe Title X in Division A of the Act, relating to detainees, in a manner consistent with the constitutional authority of the President to supervise the unitary executive branch and as Commander in Chief and consistent with the constitutional limitations on the judicial power, which will assist in achieving the shared objective of the Congress and the President, evidenced in Title X, of protecting the American people from further terrorist attacks.
Stabbed in the back by Bush, John McCain nevertheless went along for the ride. With his "no" vote this February on the Senate bill to ban waterboarding by the CIA, McCain revealed that in his never-ending quest to appease his party's conservative base, no humiliation at the hands of George Bush is too great.
Predictably, John McCain kowtowed to the White House in just his latest affirmation of a de facto Bush third term. As the Washington Post noted:
But McCain sided with the Bush administration yesterday on the waterboarding ban passed by the Senate, saying in a statement that the measure goes too far by applying military standards to intelligence agencies. He also said current laws already forbid waterboarding, and he urged the administration to declare it illegal.
"Staging a mock execution by inducing the misperception of drowning is a clear violation" of laws and treaties, McCain said.
And so it goes. John McCain endorsed the eradication of Geneva protections he today claimed to have preserved. McCain today insisted that "I had worked very hard to make sure that we didn't torture any prisoners" despite his acquiescence in President Bush's program to do exactly that. And yet it was John McCain who today attacked the Justices of the Supreme Court for being "unaccountable."
|
No Comments
Post a comment