How the Terror-Suspect Compromise Evolved - Newsweek Terror Watch

Change of Heart

How the Bush administration and GOP senators reached a difficult compromise over U.S. treatment of terror detainees.
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All Smiles Now: Republicans once divided stood united after Thursday's deal was announced. From left, Rep. Duncan Hunter, Sen. John Cornyn, national-security adviser Stephen Hadley, Sen. John McCain, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, Sen. Lindsey Graham and Sen. John Warner.

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Sept. 22, 2006 - Three renegade Republican senators may be the biggest winners in Thursday’s deal between the White House and Capitol Hill over the treatment of high-level terror detainees. The senators, John McCain, Lindsey Graham and John Warner, had led the opposition to the Bush administration's plans to redefine how the United States would apply the Geneva Conventions to terror detainees.

Two sources close to negotiations between the two sides tell NEWSWEEK that key elements of the deal were first floated by the senators as long as a week ago. (The sources familiar with the negotiations asked for anonymity because of the continuing political sensitivity of the issue.) At one point several days ago, says one of the sources, it looked like the two sides were getting close to an agreement. But the White House then backed away from the negotiations and took a hard line for several days�"for reasons that remain unclear.

But by Thursday, the administration essentially agreed to the McCain-Graham-Warner proposal that it had previously rejected. What caused this change of heart? The sources say it was clear that the GOP renegades’ position was supported by at least 51 senators. By the same token, an important element in the compromise, the sources say, was the recognition by Graham, McCain and Warner all along that neither they nor a majority of their Senate colleagues really wanted to put the CIA interrogation program completely out of business.

During a five-hour closed-door meeting Thursday on Capitol Hill, the rebel senators and their aides hammered out an agreement with White House representatives. Initially, administration officials, including President Bush, had indicated in public remarks that they believed the CIA interrogation and detention program could only go forward if Congress passed legislation clarifying an allegedly “vague” clause in the 60-year-old Geneva Conventions, an international treaty governing the treatment of prisoners. But Senators McCain, Graham and Warner maintained that international law does not permit the United States to reinterpret treaties ratified by Congress years after they went into force. If Congress did this, the senators argued, then foreign countries could reinterpret the Geneva Conventions in the event they capture American soldiers overseas and want to interrogate them using harsh methods.

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