NYT: How 3 GOP veterans stalled Bush's detainee bill

RAW STORYPublished: Saturday September 16, 2006

A front page story in Sunday's edition of the New York Times explores how three GOP veterans stalled President Bush's detainee bill.

"Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham cornered their partner, Senator John W. Warner, on the Senate floor late Wednesday afternoon," begins an article credited to Carl Hulse, Kate Zernike and Sheryl Gay Stolberg.

"Mr. Warner, the courtly Virginian who is chairman of the Armed Services Committee, had been trying for weeks to quietly work out the three Republicans’ differences with the Bush administration’s proposal to bring terrorism suspects to trial," the article continues. "But Senators McCain, of Arizona, and Graham, of South Carolina, who are on the committee with Mr. Warner, convinced him that the time for negotiation was over."

Excerpts from Times article:

The three senators, all military veterans, marched off to an impromptu news conference to lay out their deep objections to the Bush legislation. Mr. Warner then personally broke the news to Senator Bill Frist of Tennessee, the majority leader, and the next day the Armed Services Committee voted to approve a firm legislative rebuke to the president’s plan to reinterpret the Geneva Conventions.

It was a stinging defeat for the White House, not least because the views of Mr. Warner, a former Navy secretary, carry particular weight. With a long history of ties to the military, Mr. Warner, 79, has a reputation as an accurate gauge to views that senior officers are reluctant to express in public. Notably, in breaking ranks with the White House, Mr. Warner was joined by Colin L. Powell, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in a rare public breach with the administration he served as secretary of state.

The thinking was that Mr. McCain, who was tortured as a Vietnam prisoner of war, would not budge, nor would Mr. Graham, a military lawyer and zealous guardian of military standards. That left Mr. Warner as the best potential target for the White House. But as he considered the consequences of the proposal, the chairman decided to stick to his guns, saying he believed the nation’s reputation was at stake.

Mr. Graham added, “There are three branches of government, not one.”

FULL TIMES ARTICLE CAN BE READ AT THIS LINK