Washington: The Bush administration on Friday faced a raft of legal challenges to a sweeping new regime for Guantanamo that would deny court supervision to detenus in the war on terror and would bar prosecution of U.S. personnel for war crimes.

Mr Bush is expected to move within days to sign into law proposals for the treatment and trial before military tribunals of the detenus. The legislation, approved by the Senate on Thursday, is a victory for the White House over Senate Republicans, who had resisted attempts to relax standards on the treatment of detenus and depart from standard rules of evidence in their trials.

The vote, which passed 65 to 34, was cast after more than 10 hours of debate. It is a boon to Republicans, who plan to campaign on their national security credentials in the midterm elections. However, lawyers for the 460 detenus at Guantanamo say they intend to launch legal challenges to what they described as a broad assault on fundamental human rights.

``The fact that they are denying the right of habeas corpus is so unlawful and unconstitutional that it throws us back to before King John and the Magna Carta,'' said Michael Ratner, president of the Centre for Constitutional Rights, which represents many of the Guantanamo detenus.

Impassioned pleas

The first cases to go before the courts are expected to be challenges to the Senate's denial of the right of habeas corpus to inmates at Guantanamo, some of whom have been held for five years without charge. Despite impassioned pleas from human rights advocates and even some Republican Senators, legislators voted 51 to 48 on Thursday night to bar detenus from challenging their detention in the U.S. courts. The measure goes even further than legislation enacted last December that would bar future habeas corpus challenges, because it would bar even those cases already before the courts from being heard.

``No court, justice or judge shall have jurisdiction to hear or consider an application for a writ of habeas corpus filed by or on behalf of an alien detained by the United States [who] has been determined ... to have been properly detained as an enemy combatant,'' the legislation says.

About a dozen such challenges by detenus are already pending before the courts, Mr Ratner said.

``That issue will be litigated immediately,'' he said. The challenges are expected to open a new chapter in the struggle between the Bush administration and the Supreme Court over the President's authority in the war on terror. —

© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006

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