After the White House produced a letter signed by the leaders of the Pentagon's lawyers supporting a clarification of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, the Republican Senators opposed to the effort accused the Bush administration of coercing the statement. The New York Times reports today that the signatories did not get forced into signing anything:

The lawyers, known as judge advocates general, had been pivotal players in years of debate over detention, interrogation and prosecution.

They had repeatedly sparred behind the scenes with Mr. Haynes, the top civilian lawyer in the Defense Department. This summer, the judge advocates general emerged in public after the Supreme Court struck down a Bush administration plan to take an important role in opposing parts of a White House effort to resurrect military commissions for terrorism suspects in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

But at the meeting on Wednesday, Mr. Haynes sought to enlist the lawyers on the administration’s side by asking whether any would object to signing a letter lending their support to aspects of the White House proposal over which they had voiced little concern.

The lawyers agreed, but only after hours of negotiating over specific words, so that they would not appear to be wholly endorsing the plan.

What followed reflected poorly on all sides, but mostly on the judgment and ethics of those Senators who tossed accusations of impropriety without a shred of evidence, insulting not just the administration but also the honor of the Pentagon officers who signed the letter.

It started after the ad-hoc committee of JAGs hammered out the language in the letter with William Haynes, which supported clarification in general but left open whether the administration's definitions would be best for the effort. The White House then took the letter to the Hill, overstating the intention of support by the JAGs. Instead of reading the letter and parsing the difference, however, the opposition accused the White House of browbeating the endorsement from these career military professionals, slandering them with the indirect accusation of cowardice.

The Times shows that the JAGS are fighting back against this smear. General Charles Dunlap, deputy JAG of the Air Force , told the Times that he had no problem signing the statement as written, although he doesn't endorse the administration view of its intent. Dunlap also dismissed the notion that any White House could strong-arm military professionals into signing statements against their will and opinions. Dunlap was the only principal involved who would go on the record, but the Times' other sources corroborate his statements.

The JAGs agree with the administration that a clarification is required for Common Article 3 of the Geneva Convention if military and intelligence are to continue doing the tasks this war requires. The group did not agree among themselves about the definition proposed by the White House, however, and instead used language that said they "do not object" to the proposal, rather than saying they endorse it. It took the collected attorneys "hours" to negotiate this language among themselves, which shouldn't surprise anyone who has worked with a collection of attorneys over a legal statement. I've seen corporate efforts to form mission statements take far longer than that.

What everyone at the Pentagon supports is a specific clarification of Common Article 3, in a form that Congress and the White House will enforce. Allowing a vague legal standard of "shocks the conscience" to remain the only guideline practically guarantees that any technique outside of that approved for local police forces will result in attempts to hold interrogators criminally and civilly liable for their actions in defense of the nation. Those men and women deserve a specific set of rules in which they can work that allows them to perform their jobs and to get the necessary information to save American lives. Without that, they will likely refuse to interrogate in any effective manner, and they could hardly be blamed for their refusal if Congress doesn't have the courage to produce any rules on their own.

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