WASHINGTON'A bipartisan group of senators reached a compromise Monday 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 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.
Such broad legislation would be Congress' first attempt to assert some control over the detention of suspected terrorists, which the Bush administration has closely guarded as its sole prerogative.
