McCain urges resolution of Guantánamo cases

Arguing that "even Adolf Eichmann got a trial," Republican Sen. John McCain said yesterday that the Bush administration must establish a system to try and perhaps free suspected terrorists from Guantánamo Bay, Cuba — even if they turn around and attack the United States.

"Some of these guys are terrible, terrible killers and the worst kind of scum of humanity," the Arizona senator said on NBC News' "Meet the Press" of the 520 men from dozens of nations who have been swept up around the globe in the war on terror.

But, "they deserve to have some adjudication of their cases," he said, despite a "fear that, if you release them, they'll go back and fight against us. Balance that against what it's doing to our reputation throughout the world and whether it's enhancing recruiting for people to join al-Qaida and do bad things to the United States of America."

Israel hanged Eichmann in 1962 for deporting Jews and others to Germany's concentration and death camps during World War II, when 6 million Jews were killed. Israel sent agents to secretly snatch Eichmann in 1960 from an anonymous life in Argentina, then put him on public trial in Jerusalem.

Yesterday marked the third week that Washington politicians stirred the Sunday morning talk shows with debate over what to do about the 3-year-old prison complex — which has been condemned by human-rights groups as mistreating prisoners, in part because it allegedly denies captives due process.

The Bush administration says the prison camp in Cuba is humane and that the captives are Taliban or al-Qaida members, or their sympathizers.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice defended the policy from Jerusalem on CNN: "The president has an obligation to protect the American people. We had to take these people off the battlefield, we had to get intelligence," she said, alleging that some captives released from Guantánamo in the past years had turned up on "the battlefield again."

Jane Harman, D-Calif., the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said Congress needed to intervene by legislating new policies on detention and interrogations.

"Probably we should detain [suspected terrorists] on U.S. soil, which is not Guantánamo," she said. "The hard part is try them under what laws and where?"

McCain is emerging as a voice of conscience and nuance on the stay-or-go Guantánamo issue. A veteran Navy pilot who spent more than five years as a prisoner of war at Vietnam's "Hanoi Hilton," he has repeatedly avoided the issue of whether U.S. troops mistreat the detainees and focused instead on the policies they carry out.

He agreed with former presidential candidate Ross Perot — who worked to improve the treatment of American POWs in Vietnam — that reports of abuses at Guantánamo could become an incentive to treat future captives brutally.

"We will not have as high a moral ground the next time we are in a conflict and Americans should become prisoners of war," he warned. "And it worries me, it keeps me awake at night. It really does."