Stepping up oversight

In its recent rulings on enemy combatants, the U.S. Supreme Court disabused the Bush administration of its wrongheaded notion that a wartime president is not subject to the will of Congress. Now that the proper constitutional order is restored, Congress has a duty to aggressively oversee the way prisoners are being treated in the war on terrorism and in Iraq, and that means using its lawmaking and subpoena powers if necessary.

An important step toward this end is the Senate's approval of an amendment to a major Defense Department budget bill requiring the administration to make an accounting of all foreign prisoners who have not been designated POWs. The amendment, sponsored by Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., would also require the administration to release to Congress, in classified form, all Red Cross reports about the treatment of prisoners in Cuba, Iraq and Afghanistan. In addition, the legislation expressly states that all detainees at Guantanamo should be prosecuted "expeditiously" and all foreign prisoners are to be treated "humanely and in accordance with standards that the United States would consider legal if perpetrated by the enemy against an American citizen."

The amendment passed by a voice vote after an effort to table or kill the proposal failed by a 45-50 vote. Five Republican senators, including former Vietnam POW John McCain of Arizona as well as Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania and Mike DeWine of Ohio, joined all but one Democrat - Zell Miller of Georgia - to support the amendment. Obviously, officials in the Bush administration don't want to justify to Congress the detention of unknown numbers of prisoners in secret detention facilities around the world.

The Leahy amendment is a modest first step toward Congress reasserting its oversight authority. The bill will now move to a House-Senate conference where it is likely the Republican leadership will try to strip out these needed provisions. If that happens Congress will have abdicated its responsibility.

[Last modified July 12, 2004, 01:00:30]