Leading a Rebellion (Time article)

Why G.O.P. Senator Lindsey Graham is taking on the President over rules for enemy combatants
By KAREN TUMULTY, PERRY BACON JR. / WASHINGTON

If you want to understand how a baby-faced freshman Republican Senator from conservative South Carolina has come to be standing against President George W. Bush on the issue of how to interrogate and try terrorism suspects, it helps to know how Lindsey Graham spent part of his summer. A month ago, when most Senators were back home campaigning and fund raising, he was in Kabul, Afghanistan, answering to "Colonel." Wearing desert fatigues, with an M9 pistol strapped to his hip, Graham was conducting a two-day tutorial on the principles of U.S. military law at the Afghan Defense Ministry. He recalls coaching Afghan military lawyers, who are modeling their system after that of the U.S.: "It's important that when the troops act badly, they are punished to keep good order and discipline, but it's equally important that people believe that the punishment and the system itself are fair." The only Senator now serving in the National Guard or reserve, and the first in decades to do military duty in a combat zone, Graham adds, "It has to be based on what the person did and not who the person is."

That's pretty much the same argument that Graham is making back in Washington, where he is helping turn what looked like a smart political strategy into an internecine battle among Republicans on Capitol Hill. White House and congressional leaders had hoped that focusing on terrorism in the final months before a tight midterm election would give their party an advantage over the Democrats. But they didn't count on a rebellion in their own ranks, made worse by the fact that it is led by Graham and two more senior members of the Armed Services Committee who also have impressive military credentials: chairman John Warner, a former Secretary of the Navy who was a Marine ground officer in the Korean War, four years before Graham was born; and John McCain, a former Navy pilot whose father and grandfather were admirals and who still suffers from what he endured during 5 1/2 years in a North Vietnamese POW camp.

Graham got his battle testing in a military courtroom, first at Shaw Air Force Base in South Carolina and then as chief prosecutor for the Air Force in Europe during the 1980s. He insists that Bush's proposal to tamper with the interpretation of the Geneva Conventions and put detainees on trial without letting them see all the evidence against them would have far-reaching consequences because it would invite future enemies to do the same, or worse, to Americans they capture. That argument has drawn strong support from such powerful voices as Colin Powell, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and ex--Secretary of State, who in a rare public criticism of Bush policy sent McCain a letter warning that "the world is beginning to doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism." Caught in the middle have been Graham's fellow military lawyers, many of whom share misgivings about the detainee program. At a closed session of the Armed Services Committee last week, Senator John Cornyn of Texas brandished a letter signed by top lawyers of each service saying they "do not object" to a key part of Bush's plan. But he may have overstated their level of support. "That's not the whole story," Graham said to Cornyn, according to a witness. Last week, amid bitter Republican infighting and despite a White House lobbying effort that brought both Bush and Vice President Cheney to Capitol Hill, the committee defiantly passed the trio's proposal for trying and interrogating terrorism suspects, rather than Bush's. The showdown on the Senate floor, where majority leader Bill Frist is expected to introduce the President's proposal, is not likely to be pretty.

It's not the first time Graham has put the Bush Administration on the spot. When the Abu Ghraib prison scandal broke most inconveniently in a presidential election year, he demanded accountability up the chain of command. "What are we fighting for?" the Senator asked at a hearing. "To be like Saddam Hussein?" On Bush's biggest domestic initiative, Graham supported the President's idea to add individual savings accounts to Social Security but also suggested a heretical payroll-tax increase to finance them. He infuriated the right last year by joining the bipartisan, largely moderate "Gang of 14" that blocked a change in Senate rules that would have ended Democratic filibusters of Bush's judicial nominees. Graham more recently helped ice the appeals-court nomination of Defense Department counsel William Haynes, an architect of the Administration's detainee policy.