The White House and three powerful Republican senators are at an impasse over a Bush administration plan to allow tough CIA interrogations, laying bare election-season divisions among Republicans on the high profile issue of security.
In a direct challenge to US President George W. Bush, Senator John Warner, the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, said that his panel would meet yesterday to complete an alternative to the White House plan to prosecute terror suspects and redefine acts that constitute war crimes.
Warner, a former Navy secretary, said the administration proposal would lower the standard for the treatment of prisoners, potentially putting US troops at risk should other military forces retaliate.
PHOTO: AFP
The White House said Warner's proposal would undermine the US' ability to interrogate prisoners and arranged an extraordinary conference call for reporters in which the nation's top intelligence official criticized Warner's plan.
"If this draft legislation were passed in its present form, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency has told me that he did not believe that the [interrogation] program could go forward," National Intelligence Director John Negroponte told reporters.
The unusually public dispute between the White House and the senators comes as Republicans face a robust Democratic challenge in November for control of Congress, both the House of Representatives and the Senate. Republicans are trying to sell voters on their party's traditionally tough stance on security, and Bush has said legislation allowing him to prosecute terrorists is a crucial component to victory in his campaign against terror.
The Republican deadlock left the fate of Bush's proposal unclear.
The dispute echoed last year's showdown between Bush and Senator John McCain, who spent more than five years in North Vietnamese prison camps, over legislation to ban cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment of detainees. The White House threatened a Bush veto of that proposal, contending the language would hamstring interrogators, but eventually bowed to overwhelming congressional support for McCain's bill.
McCain and Senator Lindsey Graham, a former Air Force lawyer, have joined Warner this year in opposing Bush's bill.
Bush planned to visit the Capitol yesterday to try persuading his party's lawmakers to back his proposal and another measure, also stalled, that would legalize the administration's warrantless wiretapping program.
Bush's latest proposal would create military commissions to prosecute terror suspects and would redefine acts that constitute war crimes.
Bush was forced to propose the measure after the Supreme Court ruled in June that his existing court system established to prosecute terrorism suspects was illegal and violated the Geneva Conventions.
The court ruled that Common Article 3 of the conventions, which sets a baseline standard for the treatment of prisoners of war, applies to members of al-Qaeda, which Bush had disputed.
The White House has responded with proposed legislation that would narrow the US legal interpretation of the standards for treatment, a move that would allow tough interrogations of terror suspects and shield US personnel from being prosecuted for war crimes.
More than two dozen retired military officers and former defense officials weighed in Wednesday in a letter to Warner, urging Congress not to attempt to redefine violations of Common Article 3.
"If degradation, humiliation, physical and mental brutalization of prisoners is decriminalized or considered permissible under a restrictive interpretation of Common Article 3, we will forfeit all credible objections should such barbaric practices be inflicted upon American prisoners," they wrote.
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