McCain Denounces Detainee Ruling
View Aligns Him With President
By Juliet Eilperin and Michael D. Shear
PEMBERTON, N.J., June 13 — Republican Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) on Friday forcefully sided with President Bush in condemning the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to grant access to federal courts for the detainees held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, potentially muddying his reputation as a critic of the administration’s approach to treatment of suspected terrorists.
“We made it very clear these are enemy combatants,” he told more than 1,000 supporters at a town hall meeting here, echoing the president’s criticism of the court decision. “They have not, and never have been, given the rights of citizens of this country.”
The presumptive GOP nominee then read from Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.’s dissent in the case and predicted the courts will now be “flooded” with lawsuits from terrorism suspects.
“We are going to be bollixed up in a way that’s terribly unfortunate,” he said. “Our first obligation is the safety and security of this nation and the men and women who defend it. This decision will harm our ability to do that.”
At a time when McCain is eager to distance himself from Bush on a variety of issues, the Supreme Court decision forces a public discussion in an area where he and the president fully agree: that allowing detainees access to U.S. courts will undermine the fight against global terrorism.
That discussion has the potential to be politically damaging for McCain, who has strongly opposed the administration on the separate issue of how detainees should be treated. Moderates who are key to McCain’s strategy for winning the presidency may be taken aback by what they perceive as a softening of the senator’s stand against Bush’s torture policy.
Tom Malinowski, who serves as Washington advocacy director at Human Rights Watch, said voters will probably see a contradiction between McCain’s efforts to prevent torture and close the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay and “his continued support for the underlying legal principle that Guantanamo stands for, namely that detainees should not have access to a normal judicial process.”
Democrats, who use the president’s treatment of terror suspects as a way to motivate the liberal base, sought Friday to tie McCain to Bush. The liberal Center for American Progress criticized McCain for opposing the court decision merely because “it isn’t what the Bush administration wanted.”
For several years, McCain has bolstered his reputation as a maverick by challenging the president’s approach to the treatment and disposition of people suspected of terrorism.
He was the chief architect of the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, a law that arose out of the revelations of detainee abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and at Guantanamo Bay. McCain, who was tortured after he was captured in Vietnam, took a hard line against the Bush administration, wanting to ban aggressive interrogation techniques and set a moral standard for the rest of the world.
His POW status gave him instant credibility on the issue, which was followed around the world. In the often tense legislative battle with Bush, McCain repeatedly cast the treatment issue as one of respect for human rights.
“Weakening the Geneva protections is not only unnecessary, but would set an example to other countries with less respect for basic human rights that they could issue their own legislative ‘reinterpretations,’ ” he said at the time.
But there have always been two issues at stake in the debate over detainees: how to interrogate them and how to try them. On the issue of trying them, McCain has pushed for trials, but, like President Bush, he has rejected calls from human rights groups and detainee lawyers to allow them in U.S. courts.
McCain visited Guantanamo Bay in late 2003 with Sens. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) and John W. Warner (R-Va.), then the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, and the three wrote a letter to then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld asking him to start military commissions because some detainees had been held for two years without any judicial process. The letter indicates that McCain and his colleagues wanted the detainees to be tried or sent home, but it also endorsed the president’s original military commissions, which the Supreme Court later found to be unconstitutional.
“A serious process must be established in the very near term either to formally treat and process the detainees as war criminals or to return them to their countries for appropriate judicial action,” the senators wrote on Dec. 12, 2003.
That letter put McCain at odds with the Bush administration, which decided at the time that it had the right to hold detainees indefinitely. But the senator and the president now agree on how detainees should be tried.
McCain told reporters he would seek to narrow the implications of the decision in Congress. When asked if he would seek to overturn the ruling through a constitutional amendment, McCain replied, “Frankly, we should try to exhaust our legislative options” and “try to more narrowly refine” the decision.
Two Senate allies of McCain, Graham and Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.), said they would join McCain in seeking to mitigate the court ruling. Graham, who also serves as a reserve military judge, has long sought to limit detainee access to U.S. courts.
Lieberman cited the decision as a reason voters should back McCain for president over Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), who applauded the Supreme Court decision Friday. “The consequences are going to be quite different, depending on who you vote for,” he said.
Staff writers Josh White and Michael Abramowitz contributed to this report.
June 14th, 2008 | Category: Boumediene v. Bush Decision, Election 2008
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