Warner, Graham, and McCain - Wrong
Carol Platt Liebau, in a Townhall.com article, Aiding and abetting calls those three Republicans to task for their backstabbing of the President on terrorist detention.
The arguments used by Graham on a recent Hugh Hewitt interview were balloons - very little substance filled with hot air. One of the arguments used was that the way we treat terrorists now, codified into law, will come back to haunt US soldiers in future wars.But the political benefit to the Democrats is dwarfed by the boon the McCain/Graham/Warner approach bestows on America’s enemies.
First, these scum aren’t soldiers! How they’re treated doesn’t relate to how uniformed soldiers are treated in combat - it’s a non sequitor! Second, how our troops are treated in the future will have more to do with how we react to a government’s treatment of our troops than any law we have. If we retaliate for abhorent treatment of our troops, or if we put on trial for war crimes anyone whose committed atrocities on our troops, then military and political leaders will think twice about doing such things. It won’t be because we wrote a law in 2006 that didn’t give terrorists all the rights of lawful - LAWFUL - combatants.
I wonder if one of our problems in this debate is that we give McCain greater weight on POW treatment because of his past experiences. Murtha and Kerry show us the dangers we face going down that path. Let’s hear from some other former POWs about how they want this law to be crafted.
Oh, and some of those civilian prisoners from either WWII or other times, if any of them still live. I recall hearing about one woman who’d been imprisoned in the south pacific. When the camp commandant had been hanged by the entrance to the camp, long lines of former prisoners passed by just to see him dead. Her husband found her and tried to talk her out of passing by the grisly scene. She had to explain to him that this was her third trip past - each time being more satisfying than the previous one.
