US senate to weigh Guantanamo rights compromise
(Reuters)
Updated: 2005-11-15 11:25

Detainees at the Guantanamo Bay prison convicted by U.S. military tribunals could have their cases reviewed by federal courts under a bipartisan compromise offered on Monday by senators who said the chamber moved too far last week to block inmates' access to courts.

The Senate was set to vote on Tuesday on the compromise worked out by Republican Lindsey Graham and Democrat Carl Levin.

Graham sponsored the original amendment passed by the Senate on Thursday that denied enemy combatants at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the right to go to federal court to challenge their detention.

Graham of South Carolina said the compromise "corrects a flaw in my amendment" which did not provide the right of an appeal from a military tribunal to federal court.

The compromise also restores federal court jurisdiction over pending cases, and provides for a court review of whether standards and procedures of the tribunals are consistent with the U.S. Constitution.

With the compromise, there would be an automatic appeal for detainees facing a death sentence or at least 10 years imprisonment. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia would determine whether it would hear cases with less than 10-year sentences.

Civil rights advocates were alarmed when Graham's amendment cleared the Senate last week on a 49-42 vote, saying it would strip any federal court oversight for people the Bush administration has declared enemy combatants in the war on terror and who are being held at Guantanamo Bay.

'SIGNIFICANT IMPROVEMENT'

Levin said the compromise was a "significant improvement" over Graham's original, and he would support it if an amendment pushed by Democrats to keep detainees' habeas corpus rights is defeated in Tuesday's voting.

Levin said he preferred an amendment, sponsored by Democrat Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico, to maintain inmates' ability under a 2004 Supreme Court decision to use habeas corpus petitions to challenge the legality of their detention, but with measures to stem frivolous lawsuits over detainees' living conditions.

Bingaman argued that the Bush administration has left the detainees, mostly scooped up in the war in Afghanistan, in a legal limbo, holding them indefinitely without charges and depriving them of protections under the laws of war.

Graham said the Senate's support last week for his original amendment reflected lawmakers' frustration that habeas corpus claims "were being exercised by noncitizen foreign terrorist suspects to the point that they were flooding our courts."

Granting enemy combatants such access to federal courts gives "an enemy prisoner a right that an enemy prisoner has never enjoyed before in the law of armed conflict," he said.

The Senate debate comes after the Supreme Court said last week it would decide whether President George W. Bush had the power to create the military commissions to put Guantanamo prisoners on trial for war crimes.

The amendments were being considered on a bill authorizing defense and nuclear weapons programs that also contains language prohibiting the use of torture and setting rules for interrogations of detainees.

The Bush administration has threatened to veto this bill and another bill necessary to fund the Pentagon if they contained the language setting standards on detainee treatment, arguing it would impede efforts to get information to block acts of terrorism.