Bush Fails in bid to gut Geneva Conventions.

It has stood unchallenged for sixty years. All people, all nations, accept the inherent rightness of the Geneva Conventions. It was, after all, arrived at collectively after the bloodiest war in mankind's history. It states what is acceptable and what is not acceptable behaviour in the way we treat captured enemy prisoners.

It beggars belief that anyone would seek to "clarify" what the Conventions mean when their meaning is universally accepted.

And yet that is exactly what Bush has set out to do and I am delighted to report that his own party have turned on him and thoroughly rejected his reasoning.

The show of defiance came hours after Mr Bush made a rare visit to Capitol Hill to drum up support for White House proposals to limit America's commitment to the Geneva convention on treatment of prisoners. Four Senate Republicans, including John Warner, the chairman of the armed services committee, joined Democrats to vote against the proposals setting the stage for a showdown with the White House.

The struggle within the Republican party deepened further yesterday when it emerged that the former secretary of state and general Colin Powell had also repudiated the White House's plans.

In a letter to Senator John McCain - one of three powerful Republicans opposed to White House proposals for new legislation on detainees - Mr Powell said it would be a mistake to reduce America's commitment to the Geneva convention. "The world is beginning to doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism," he wrote. The letter, written on Wednesday, was released by Mr McCain yesterday.

At the centre of the row is a proposal by President Bush to narrow the definition of Article 3 of the convention on the humane treatment of prisoners and immunity for US interrogators from possible prosecution for war crimes.

But some of the most senior Republicans were having none of it - including the committee's chairman, John Warner, as well as John McCain, a former prisoner of war and favourite for the party's 2008 White House nomination, and Lindsey Graham, Senator for South Carolina and a former military lawyer.

All three joined with Susan Collins of Maine, another moderate Republican, and with committee Democrats in a 15-9 vote for the Committee's own bill.

A showdown now looms when the full Senate takes up the detention issue, probably next week.

One gets the distinct feeling that Rove hoped that this issue would split Democrats and enable him to present the Republicans as strong on security whilst the Democrats appeared to be arguing for the rights of terrorists.

If that was the plan, it has spectacularly backfired. The Democrats have been able to largely sit this one out whilst the Republican Party have gone at each others throats.

The intervention of Colin Powell was a serious challenge to the administration's reasoning. He pointed out that this bill, if passed, would endanger US personnel taken prisoners in battle.

This produced some strange admissions from his Republican colleagues.

Representative Peter T. King, Republican of New York and chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, said: “I just think John McCain is wrong on this. If we capture bin Laden tomorrow and we have to hold his head under water to find out when the next attack is going to happen, we ought to be able to do it.”

This is the Chairman of the Homeland Security Committee openly calling for the right to torture people. As always in these arguments he presents the worst case scenario - the capture of bin Laden and the threat of an imminent attack - as the best way to advance his outrageous claim. But make no mistake, what is allowed in relation to bin Laden would become the standard practice for captured prisoners in the War on Terror.

Tony Snow, the White House Press Secretary, went as far as to claim that Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions' meaning has never been "defined".

MR. SNOW: Well, that's because Common Article III had never been construed as applying to any conflict in which the United States had ever been a party. And furthermore, it has not been construed as applying to conflicts for the most part that afflicted any of our allies, to which they've been a party. It is something that they had never had to think about, and for which there was not a substantial and settled body of law that would define what the terms mean. And this is a key point. Nobody has defined in law what the terms mean. And we think it's important not only that we define what the terms mean, but that our -- the people who are working for us, either as soldiers in the field, or those who are doing the questioning for the CIA, they have to know that it passes constitutional muster, and it is defined and approved as abiding by our international treaty obligations.

The reason nobody talked about this from 1948 is, it hadn't come up.

We should be grateful that the Administration is coming out into the open and arguing for what they actually believe, even as we are shocked when we discover what those beliefs actually are.

The Bush administration is now arguing for the right to torture and seeking to place their interrogators beyond the reach of international law. The Republicans who are mounting the challenge against the Bush logic are standing up for what is best in America.

For make no mistake, the Bush regime are not merely reinterpreting the Geneva Conventions, they are reinterpreting America and what she stands for.

It is in all of our interests that Bush loses this argument.

Tags: Bush, Republicans, Article 3, Geneva Conventions, torture, war crimes,