News In Briefs

Senate Approves Torture

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Senate on Thursday gave final approval to a bill for tough interrogation and prosecution of terrorism suspects, as President George W. Bush prevailed after a series of setbacks on his detainee policies.
The Senate passed the bill 65-34, hours after Bush was on Capitol Hill urging Republicans to stay behind the high-profile measure ahead of November 7 elections that will determine control of Congress.

The House of Representatives passed the same measure on Wednesday and must make a technical change to reconcile it with the Senate's. Bush was expected to sign it soon afterward.
While the bill cleared the Senate by a comfortable margin, it barely survived an earlier challenge that would have delayed and possibly killed it.
"The Senate sent a strong signal to the terrorists that we will continue using every element of national power to pursue our enemies and to prevent attacks on America," Bush said in a statement after the Senate vote.
"The Military Commissions Act of 2006 will allow the continuation of a CIA program that has been one of America's most potent tools in fighting the war on terror," Bush said.
The bill sets standards for interrogating suspects, but through a complex set of rules that human rights groups said could allow harsh techniques that bordered on torture such as sleep deprivation and induced hypothermia.
It establishes military tribunals that would allow some use of evidence obtained by coercion, but would give defendants access to classified evidence being used to convict them.
The bill also expands the definition of "enemy combatants" mostly held at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to include those who provide weapons, money and other support to terrorist groups.
The Supreme Court struck down Bush's first system of military commissions to try suspects, leaving the process in limbo with no successful prosecutions since the September 11 attacks. Bush then faced a rebellion over his revised plan that three leading Republican senators said would allow abusive interrogations and unfair trials.

AGGRESSIVE INTERROGATIONS ALLOWED
After a high-stakes negotiation, Bush got much of what he wanted in the bill to continue the once-secret CIA program of detention and aggressive interrogations of suspects that critics said amounted to torture.
Democrats and some Republicans criticized the compromise for stripping detainees of rights to launch court challenges of their detentions.
Voting 51-48, Republicans beat an amendment that would have restored those rights and potentially derailed the bill. Four Republicans and one Democrat crossed party lines on the vote.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania said the right to challenge one's detention was fundamental in American law, and the Supreme Court would reject the plan if it were stripped.
"This is wrong. It is unconstitutional. It is un-American," said Patrick Leahy of Vermont, the committee's top Democrat. He said it was intended to choke off access to Guantanamo to "ensure that the Bush-Cheney administration will never again be embarrassed by a United States Supreme Court decision reviewing its unlawful abuses of power."
Most Republicans said lawsuits from Guantanamo inmates were clogging the courts and detracted from the war on terrorism.
Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions said the bill should not "create a long-term battle with the courts over everybody that's being detained. It is a function of the military and the executive branch to conduct a war."
Republicans on tight votes beat several other challenges by Democrats who said the bill fell short of fair judicial standards and would spark more international outrage at the U.S. treatment of detainees since the September 11 attacks.
"This bill gives an administration that lobbied for torture exactly what it wanted," said Sen. John Kerry, a Massachusetts Democrat.
But Armed Services Committee Chairman John Warner, a Virginia Republican, said enemy combatants were "unlawful by all international standards in the manner in which they conduct war, and yet this great nation ... is going to mete out a measure of justice."

posted by Steve @ Friday, September 29, 2006