Light Escapes From Gitmo Black Hole

It's not real good for true democracy.

Another early AM WaPo piece. This time the Senate has apparently reached a deal allowing Guantanamo detainees some legal rights, but denying them of others.

McCain's torture and abuse amendment looks to be part of the deal struck yesterday. The Graham amendment would eliminate habeas corpus claims but will incorporate a proposal by Senator Levin that would allow appeals, or petition for appeal depending on the sentence(see Jeralyn Merritt's work linked to below)

Here's a bit of what WaPo is reporting:

A bipartisan group of senators reached a compromise yesterday that would dramatically alter U.S. policy for treating captured terrorist suspects by granting them a final recourse to the federal courts but stripping them of some key legal rights.

The compromise links legislation written by Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), which would deny detainees broad access to federal courts, with a new measure authored by Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.) that would grant detainees the right to appeal the verdict of a military tribunal to a federal appeals court. The deal will come to a vote today, and the authors say they are confident it will pass.

Graham and Levin indicated they would then demand that House and Senate negotiators link their measure with the effort by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) to clearly ban torture and abuse of terrorism suspects being held in U.S. facilities.

"McCain's amendment needs to be part of the overall package, because it deals with standardizing interrogation techniques and will reestablish moral high ground for the United States," Graham said.

Such broad legislation would be Congress's first attempt to assert some control over the detention of suspected terrorists, which the Bush administration has closely guarded as its sole prerogative. By linking a provision to deny prisoners the right to challenge their detention in federal court with language restricting interrogation methods, senators hope to soften the administration's ardent opposition to McCain's anti-torture provision -- or possibly win its support.

(More at link)

For additional reading see: Talk Left's Jeralyn Merritt's Excellent post at Huffington. Please follow the link back to Talk Left where she outlines the dangers of removing habeas corpus protections.

*sigh*

On Edit: More on habeas corpus via WaPo