Compromise Reached on Detainee Rights and Torture?

The Washington Post is reporting that a compromise will be voted on in the Senate over the issue of whether suspected terrorists can challenge their legal status in federal courts. The compromise will also apparently push McCain's amendment to restrict interrogation methods such as torture. This is also an effort to get the Bush administration to support McCain's amendment banning torture, which the administration has already threatened to veto. Vice President Cheney remains opposed to any compromise on McCain's amendment and there are divisions in the White House on the issue. We'll see Congress and the Bush administration do once the Senate votes on the compromise. Here is a portion of the article:

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...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.

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--Tom Hayes