This article originally provided by The Brattleboro Reformer

September 20, 2007

Leahy's detainee rights bill rejected

By EVAN LEHMANN, Reformer Washington Bureau
Brattleboro Reformer

Leahy was visibly downcast as he left the Senate floor, following another defeat for Democrats who were swept into power last year on the promise of dramatically altering the administration's course in Iraq and on other controversial issues.

The measure, which failed by four votes, would have been a blow to the White House's strict treatment of enemy combatants in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and other secret prisons abroad.

"We would scream bloody murder if we couldn't at least see what the charge was," Leahy told the Reformer. "We seem to think we can preach to all the rest of the world about what they shouldn't do, but not what we do."

Fifty-six senators supported the amendment, including six Republicans and independent Bernard Sanders of Vermont. Sixty votes were needed to overcome a Republican filibuster and move the measure toward a final vote needing 51 supporters to pass.

Gaining six Republican backers was a small consolation. In a similarly failed vote last year, Leahy and other supporters garnered just 48 votes, of which three were Republicans.

Convincing GOP lawmakers to defect Wednesday was not easy. Leahy pinpointed several moderate Republicans as the vote progressed, cornering them on the Senate floor and pressuring them to support the amendment.

These were mostly affable moments with some smiles and arm-grabbing, but also intense lobbying by Leahy, who engaged John Warner, R-Va., Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., Larry Craig, R-Idaho, and Joe Lieberman, I-Conn. In the end, Leahy turned just one.

"Hagel was a switch," he said afterward. "I got him."

Republicans argued that Leahy's amendment to restore the writ of habeas corpus would open U.S. courts to a flood of petitions by hundreds of detainees determined to be sworn enemies of the United States.

Yet some Republicans facing tough re-election prospects in moderate states saw the vote as an opportunity to break from the embattled president and oppose one of his controversial initiatives.

Sen. John Sununu, R-N.H., is one of them.

After voting, Sununu appeared to receive a verbal lashing from Republican Sen. Jon Kyl of Arizona, who gesticulated angrily at the New Hampshire lawmaker.

Sununu defensively invoked "the Constitution" in rebuttal, apparently arguing that habeas is included in the document.

But Kyl objected to the view that enemy combatants are protected under the U.S. Constitution, warning colleagues before the vote: "Never has such an unprecedented legal right been granted to a prisoner of war or detainee."

The administration has detained hundreds of prisoners since the United States' invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. The Supreme Court ruled that they had the right to challenge their incarceration in U.S. courts.

In response, Congress last year, still in Republican control, passed the Military Commission's Act, which enshrined into law the prohibition against detainees' use of habeas corpus.

Leahy's failed amendment Wednesday to the Defense Authorization Act, a sweeping military policy bill, would have reversed the ban on habeas. Leahy said he'll continue to pursue the change, but didn't know when or how.

With the status quo preserved, only detainees chosen for prosecution under military commissions can contest their confinement. Most prisoners, however, have not been prosecuted and face no legal means of challenging their imprisonment.

"Under current law, any of these people can be detained forever, without the ability to challenge their detention in federal court, simply on the executive's say-so," Leahy said on the Senate floor.

"As our founders knew well, no administration can be trusted with that kind of power."