US: The US Senate was set last night to approve a bill to allow the US to arrest anywhere and detain indefinitely foreigners suspected of supporting terrorism, strip them of habeas corpus rights and try them on the basis of coerced evidence.
Congress is today expected to send the bill to the president for signing into law, after senators rejected amendments that would restore habeas corpus rights and give Congress more oversight over the detainee programme.
"People shouldn't forget there's still an enemy out there that wants to do harm to the United States, and therefore a lot of my discussion with the members of the Senate was to remind them of this solemn responsibility," Mr Bush said after meeting Republican senators.
The White House claims the bill is necessary to bring dangerous terrorists to trial and to allow the CIA to extract from suspects important information that could affect America's safety.
Critics say the new law is tyrannical and flies in the face of fundamental constitutional principles that have underpinned US democracy for more than two centuries.
Human rights groups warn that, although the bill bans some extreme forms of torture - including flogging, branding, rape and biological experiments - it could permit such methods as extreme sleep deprivation and extended use of stress positions.
The bill establishes military tribunals to try unlawful enemy combatants, defined as any person "who has engaged in hostilities or who has purposefully and materially supported hostilities against the United States or its co-belligerents".
Detainees could be tried on the basis of evidence obtained through coercion if a judge determines that such evidence is credible and some evidence could be withheld from defendants for security reasons. Stripped of habeas corpus rights, detainees could not challenge their imprisonment through federal courts.
Democrats joined a handful of moderate Republicans to warn that the bill was morally wrong and possibly unconstitutional.
"The habeas corpus language in this bill is as legally abusive of rights guaranteed in the constitution as the actions at Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo and secret prisons that were physically abusive of detainees," Democratic senator Carl Levin said.
The bill's passage came as Mr Bush defended his record on terrorism after the release of an official intelligence assessment suggesting that the US-led invasion of Iraq had promoted terrorism.
In an interview to be broadcast on CBS on Sunday, veteran reporter Bob Woodward claims the administration has failed to tell the truth about the scale of violence in Iraq. "The truth is that the assessment by intelligence experts is that next year, 2007, is going to get worse and, in public, you have the president and you have the Pentagon [ saying], 'Oh, no, things are going to get better.' Now there's public, and then there's private. But what did they do with the private? They stamp it secret. No one is supposed to know," Mr Woodward says.
