US Senate flexes muscles on control of the war?

I was really delighted to learn from the WaPo today that,

The Senate defied the White House yesterday and voted to set new limits on interrogating detainees in Iraq and elsewhere, underscoring Congress’s growing concerns about reports of abuse of suspected terrorists and others in military custody.
Forty-six Republicans joined 43 Democrats and one independent in voting to define and limit interrogation techniques that U.S. troops may use against terrorism suspects, the latest sign that alarm over treatment of prisoners in the Middle East and at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, is widespread in both parties. The White House had fought to prevent the restrictions, with Vice President Cheney visiting key Republicans in July and a spokesman yesterday repeating President Bush’s threat to veto the larger bill that the language is now attached to — a $440 billion military spending measure.

The interrogation rules are, as I have argued endlessly on JWN all along, a really important issue in themselves. We have yet to see whether, as the deliberations over this particular spending bill proceed, the Senate negotiators can succeed in imposing their will (or a substantial portion of it) on the generally much more unprincipled people in the House of Representatives, and on the unarguably more unprincipled man in the White House. But 90 Senate votes are certainly enough to overturn a Presidential veto, if it should come to that, if all those Senators just hang in there…
It was Sen. John McCain (R, AZ), who had led the fight in the Senate on this issue, and he prominently mentioned the anguished communications he had had from Capt. Ian Fishback. (Thank you, Capt. Fishback: One person’s principled actions can indeed make a difference in the world.) The WaPo piece noted that McCain’s key allies in this battle were “Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), a former military lawyer, and Armed Services Committee Chairman John W. Warner (R-Va.) ” Alert readers might note that none of these three named sentaors is affiliated with the supposed “opposition” party here in the US…
The McCain measure would limit all US forces– and also, I think, all “other government agencies”, codewords for the CIA– to using only interrogation techniques authorized in the U.S. Army Field Manual on Intelligence Interrogation. If enacted, this legislation would materially improve the situation of the 10,000 or more people around the world– mainly, in Iraq and Afghanistan– who are currently in the custody of US forces.
This is in itself a great reason to support this legislation– and also, to give due credit to Sens. McCain, Graham, and Warner for their postion.
But I wonder: Is this also the beginning of a broader process whereby the US Congress attempts to regain more control of the country’s war-fighting processes and decisionmaking in a broader sense? Under the Constitution, only Congress can “declare war” on foreign enemies, but it is up to the executive branch to handle the waging of the war– within the broad, continuing parameter that Congress always retains the power of the purse.
But back in October 2002, both houses of Congress disgracefully fell asleep at the wheel of their very solemn responsibilities regarding declaring (that is, initiating) a war, and they gave GWB a totally blank check to do whatever he wanted with regard to Iraq. And since then, whenever he’s come back in with one more bloated war-spending request after another, they have continued to give him a blank check– and even, as I recall, to allocate him meven more war-fighting mega-bucks than what he was asking for.
And now, as we know, states and localities throughout the country– not only in our hurricane-ravaged Gulf coast region– are paying the price for those failures by Congress to take a responsible stand on war-spending.
In one sense, the fight over the interrogation rules can be seen as a tiny microcosm of the broader battle over control over this war effort thathas run– continues to run!– so horribly amok. The White House had tried to argue to the senators that tightening the interrogation rules “risked undermining US success in the war on terror”. The senators confronted that argument head-on and said, “No it won’t.”
Maybe as a next step they’ll look at the whole ball of wax, and say, “You know what, the whole ‘war on terror’ as currently being fought by the Bush administration isn’t actually reducing terror at all… It’s time for a radical rethink here.”
We can hope… And maybe as a way of pushing this process forward, we should all mail copies of General Odom’s great remarks to any US Senators and members of Congress that we can think of!