Measure would strip rights from detainees
Senate bill curbs court oversight in Guantanamo cases
WASHINGTON -- The US Senate yesterday voted to abolish the right of Guantanamo Bay prisoners to challenge the legality of their detention in federal court, a sweeping proposal that would reverse a 2004 Supreme Court ruling, end a pending Supreme Court review of military commissions at the base, and bring to an abrupt halt more than 150 individual detainee cases.
The proposal was contained in an amendment sponsored by Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, to a Defense Department authorization bill. The Senate voted 49-42 to approve the amendment over the strenuous objections of a minority of senators, who argued that such a major change should first be discussed in committee.
Should it become law, the proposal would be the first time that the right to file a lawsuit challenging one's detention has been suspended since World War II, when President Franklin Roosevelt ordered tens of thousands of Japanese-Americans on the West Coast to be imprisoned in internment camps.
The amendment would allow the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia to review whether the military correctly followed its own procedures when it conducted administrative hearings to determine whether the detainees were enemy combatants. Beyond that narrow question, no judge or court would be entitled to hear any claim from a Guantanamo detainee.
The military's administrative tribunals, which it created following the 2004 Supreme Court case that extended federal court jurisdiction to Guantanamo detainees, have been widely criticized because they do not allow a detainee a lawyer or a chance to see all the evidence against him in order to make the case that he may be an innocent person who was detained by mistake.
Graham argued that ending federal court jurisdiction to hear detainee lawsuits was necessary in order to bring greater order to the war on terrorism prison operations. Captured enemy fighters held outside the United States, he said, should not have a right to lawyers and should not be able to clog the federal court systems with complaints about their treatment.
''It's impossible to interrogate people with this much court intervention," Graham said. ''We're undermining the role that Guantanamo plays in helping our own security."
But Senator Jeff Bingaman, Democrat of New Mexico, said that the proposal would undermine a basic protection against government tyranny that dates to the Magna Carta. The right to file a petition challenging the legality of a Guantanamo prisoner's detention, he said, was ''specifically recognized by our Supreme Court."
Barring that right ''would be a major mistake," Bingaman said.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania, said that a sweeping legal change that would reverse a Supreme Court decision should be heard in committee before a vote on it is taken on the Senate floor.
It remained unclear, however, whether the proposal had enough support to remain in the final bill. Democrats planned to offer a subsequent amendment to delete the provision stripping federal courts of jurisdiction to hear Guantanamo cases, and human rights groups monitoring the vote said they hoped a majority of senators may support that change.
''The Graham Amendment will only serve to reinforce the growing perception in the world that the United States has become an enemy of human rights," said the Center for Constitutional Rights, which brought the original Supreme Court case that opened Guantanamo to prisoner lawsuits and has coordinated the resulting lawsuits.
The proposal also presented a rare case in which some conservative legal activists who usually support the Bush administration's war on terrorism policies against attacks by human rights groups agreed with the critics. Among them, David Rivkin and Lee Casey, who served in the Justice Department in the Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations, wrote an essay published yesterday by the Los Angeles Times saying that there was no reason for Graham's amendment.
In a separate war matter, the Senate voted 82-9 to require National Intelligence Director John Negroponte to provide the Senate and House intelligence committees with details of any secret facilities where the United States holds or has held terrorism suspects.
Material from the Associated Press was used in this report. 