Jim Webb: “I would like to say that I believe the Senator from Colorado has a good point. I say that as someone who is a strong…”

“I would like to say that I believe the Senator from Colorado has a good point. I say that as someone who is a strong supporter of military commissions, who in many cases has aligned himself with my good friend the Senator from South Carolina and Senator McCain as well on these issues. To me, this is not a jurisdictional issue, and it is not an issue about whether we should be holding people under military commissions under the right cases or under military detention under the right cases. My difficulty and the reason I support what Senator Udall is doing is in the statutory language itself. I say this as someone who spent a number of years drafting this kind of legislation as a committee counsel. I have gone back over the last 2 days again and again, reading these sections against each other--1031 and 1032 particularly--and I am very concerned about how this language would be interpreted, not in the here and now, as we see the stability we have brought to our country since 9/11, but what if something were to happen and we would be under more of a sense of national emergency and this language would be interpreted for broader action. The reason I have this concern is we are talking here about the conditions under which our military would be sent into action inside our own borders. In that type of situation, we need to be very clear and we must very narrowly define how they would be used and, quite frankly, if they should be used at all inside our borders.…”