A Prediction That Came True
Unfortunately. Brendan Miniter writes in the Opinion Journal about the prediction he made about John McCain.
WASHINGTON–At the start of the congressional debate over military tribunals for terrorists, I offered House Armed Services Committee Chairman Duncan Hunter a prediction: Sen. John McCain would be the biggest obstacle to enacting rules to effectively prosecute al Qaeda operatives.
It was near the end of an hourlong interview, at the end of a hot August day. But Mr. Hunter was obviously piqued by the assertion that his friend and a man who was tortured at the hands of North Vietnamese captors would do anything to make it harder to win the war on terror. Sitting up, Mr. Hunter answered the assertion: "Well, I don't agree with that."
As we sat in his spacious office with its view of the Capitol dome, the chairman had been making the case for a hardnosed approach to national security and, somewhat surprisingly, giving a frank and at times critical assessment of the war on terror and the state of the U.S. military. In the past, Mr. Hunter has clashed with the Bush administration over defense spending and intelligence reorganization. As a combat veteran of Vietnam and father of a U.S. Marine lieutenant who fought in the battle for Fallujah, Iraq, Mr. Hunter understands both the anxiety of staying the course and also the danger involved in losing a war by undercutting the troops fighting it.
He was quick to point out his belief that the reason al Qaeda hasn't struck again on U.S. soil is that the response to 9/11 involved a lot more than bombing terrorist training camps: "We didn't just sit back in fortress America." By liberating Afghanistan and Iraq and pursuing a global war against al Qaeda and its affiliates, he said, "we've kept them off balance."
He also noted that it's impossible to know how many would-be terrorists (or those who would harbor them) have been deterred by the administration's aggressive foreign policies. Yet he fears the U.S. risks losing its momentum if it doesn't soon move to counter the changing face of al Qaeda as well as rogue regimes. In the budget-driven politics of Washington, that means spending a large pile of money on programs that some members of Congress have worked long and hard to kill, such as missile defense. It also means spending billions to "reset" equipment chewed up in Iraq and–in Mr. Hunter's view–$100 billion in the coming years to modernize the force with new military technology.
These days, it's not a lack of funds that overhangs political debates inside the Beltway. It's a lack of resolve among some members to support tough-minded war policies. That's evident now in the debate over terrorist tribunals.
To keep up war momentum, the U.S. now needs to put terrorists on trial. And to do that Mr. Hunter supports enacting rules, requested by the president, that would allow military tribunals to try and convict terrorists using hearsay evidence and to use classified information, even if it is withheld from the defendant. The goal, in Mr. Hunter's view, is to provide a "modicum of fairness," while also taking into account battlefield realities. Soldiers aren't police officers. In the midst of a firefight, they can't be expected to collect forensic evidence for a criminal trial.
Treating terrorists under the rules of the Geneva Conventions, which specifically excluded covering people like that, is not at all a good move. It is quite obvious that the Geneva Conventions desperately need to be updated. They were never intended to be a suicide pact, however. Military tribunals should have the right to keep secret intelligence secret from people who would use that intelligence to kill Americans. That is common sense.
Treating terrorists as criminals with full legal rights under American law is what brought us 9/11 in the first place. McCain and his buddies are apparently unable to learn from the recent past.
