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Monday, October 2, 2006
Make the call: Terrorists or criminals?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
For more than a decade — but most evidently and dramatically over the past five years — two distinct views have emerged as the defining difference in how we confront the evil that threatens.
It is, and has been since the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, a law enforcement problem, as then-President Bill Clinton defined it by words and deeds. Or it is, as President George W. Bush defines it with his words and deeds, a war on terrorism. Everything else, including last week’s debate in the U.S. House and Senate over legislation to establish military commissions, the rights of unlawful enemy combatants and the role of U.S. courts in intervening, flows from that key difference.
The difference roughly splits left and right, but on the legal issues raised last week a number of libertarians, who fall in between and who fear the power of Big Government to abuse the rights of its citizens, raised concerns about a failure to grant habeas corpus rights to foreign terrorists facing military tribunals.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) argued unsuccessfully that all persons held in U.S. custody, including noncitizens, should be granted the same rights as common thieves in this country. Three Republicans joined him and one Democrat, Ben Nelson of Nebraska, crossed over to oppose. The amendment failed, 51-48.
It initially appeared that three Senate Republicans — Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, John Warner of Virginia and John McCain of Arizona — would muck it up. They seemed to provide cover to Democrats who on terrorism often sound like filmmaker Oliver Stone, who insisted at the San Sebastian International Film Festival on Thursday that the United States should fight terrorism “the same ways that the British fought the IRA or the Spanish government fought the Basques here” in Spain. In Stone’s view, and many on the left, “terrorism is a manageable action. It can be lived with.” He went off the deep end from there.
This hatred of Bush tempts most of the Democratic Party’s angry anti-war wing to make absurd statements and bad policy. The fear here was that Graham, Warner and McCain’s opposition on the tribunals, when combined with the understandable libertarian fear of Big Government and core Democratic opposition, would result in legislation that effectively destroyed their usefulness by subjecting everything from food to interrogation to endless litigation in federal courts. That would constitute mucking up the president’s bill and hamstringing this country’s efforts to prosecute terrorists.
In the end, however, Graham’s training as a military reserve legal officer proved valuable in drawing a real distinction between the laws of military conflict and those of domestic civil and criminal activity. As U.S. Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) noted afterward, “While this bill provides important rules of law procedures for illegal enemy combatants, it does not give them the same protections which we afford lawful enemy combatants or our own military personnel, and that is a critical distinction. That’s how it ought to be.”
That is a critical distinction and it is how it ought to be.
Without reinterpreting or defining the Geneva Conventions, which apply to nations and to their structured, uniformed military combatants — lawful combatants — the legislation takes a separate tact. It prohibits war crimes for the United States and defines prohibited interrogation techniques, but leaves to the president authority to approve other interrogation techniques that may be productive.
The bill draws a distinction between the rights of lawful combatants, unlawful combatants and U.S. citizens facing trial. The role of federal courts is clarified and limited. The rights of unlawful combatants facing military tribunals are cleared up. Congress, required by the U.S. Supreme Court to sanction the tribunals, has done its job, making clear that these are extensions of the battlefield, not U.S. criminal courts.
It is unfortunate that the nation cannot have an honest debate leading to either consensus or, absent that, a clear winner and loser on this critical question: Is the United States fighting a war on terrorism or an international criminal enterprise that has as its goal the arrest and prosecution in federal court of Osama bin Laden and others who can be found by evidence admissible in federal courts to have been hands-on responsible for specific acts?
We simply see the threats differently. Either the law enforcement view or the terrorism view has ultimately to prevail.
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Women, men and politics
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Gov. Sonny Perdue’s lead over Lt. Gov. Mark Taylor is 19 points, 53 to 34 percent, according to an AJC-commissioned poll by Mason-Dixon Polling and Research. Perdue led in all parts of the state, drawing support of 58 percent of men and 49 percent of women, while Taylor pulls 31 percent of men and 38 percent of women. About 11 percent said they were undecided and 2 percent favored the libertarian, Garrett Hayes.
The surprise to me is that Taylor is not running stronger among women. Black women are cinch Democrats and the fact that even with their loyalty, he still pulls no more than 38 percent of the female vote is telling. I haven’t quite put my finger on it, but Taylor has some version of Richard Nixon’s five o’clock shadow. Something he projects does not appeal to women. I suspect that it’s his size, which women either find intimidating or see as a lack of discipline. I didn’t see anything in his race against Cathy Cox that would create the impression that he’s a bully — the real danger when a guy his size runs against a woman people like. It may simply be that he’s now beaten two women in statewide campaigns who are popular among Democratic women — State Rep. Mary Margaret Oliver of Decatur for lieutenant governor and now Cox — and they hold it against him. Whatever it is, time’s running out.
This is a campaign season where the war on terror, pro and con, has sucked the life out of every other issue. Immigration was hot. Health care had potential. Energy had its moment as a campaign issue. The deficit and pork-barrel spending ignited the fiscal conservatives for months. But nationally it’s the war. And in the state, it’s likeability.
The question, though, is whether beyond a visceral sense of comfort with certain candidates, men and women are drawn to candidates for different reasons. Democratic women talk of the “women’s vote” as though its monolithic, which of course it’s not. By “women’s vote,” they mean issues associated with liberal Democrats, like abortion and expanded social services. (The debate on this blog, incidentally, doesn’t reflect any gender differences on issues that I can pick up.)
Questions: Do men and women see government and politicians differently? Or should that be: do single and married men/women see them differently? And what are the vibes that men and women candidates send out that attract us or turn us off? Do looks matter? Katherine Harris, the Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate in Florida, who is attractive, has been criticized for coming across as too flirtatious in some TV interviews. Would we think that of Janet Reno?
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