Bush signs anti-terror law

BY TOM BRUNE | Newsday Washington Bureau

October 18, 2006

WASHINGTON - President George W. Bush yesterday signed an act authorizing his orders for tough CIA interrogations and military trials of accused terrorists, and his administration moved quickly to assert his authority under the new law.

In the first action taken under the Military Commissions Act of 2006, the Justice Department yesterday notified the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals that the new law strips it and all other courts of jurisdiction over the hundreds of pending habeas petitions filed by Guantanamo Bay detainees.

Administration lawyers also are preparing for trials under the newly designed tribunals that it hopes to hold for high-profile accused terrorists, including alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed, White House spokesman Tony Snow said yesterday.

Those trials could be held in as little as two to three months, Snow said.

"The bill I sign today helps secure this country and it sends a clear message: This nation is patient and decent and fair and will never back down from threats to our freedom," Bush said.

But while Bush at a White House signing ceremony lauded the act for preserving the "vital" CIA secret interrogation program because it will save lives, a religious coalition in the rain outside protested a law it says condones torture, and detainees' lawyers in Boston and Washington immediately filed a motion that challenges the court-stripping provision.

Several of the act's provisions will be challenged in court, including the law's broad definition of enemy combatant and the ban on habeas petitions, say lawyers for detainees.

Although the act won approval with bipartisan support in Congress late last month, it remains emotionally and politically charged, touching off angry reactions by human rights activists and liberal Democrats while feeding into the Republicans' political campaign based on Bush's war on terror.

Amnesty International said, "Now bad policy has become bad law. The administration can now hold people indefinitely, without charge or without trial, with congressional authorization."

But several Republicans lambasted Democrats who voted against the bill, charging they seek to "pamper terrorists" and "give them new rights." Many Democrats responded that Bush bungled the tribunals, losing court cases that delayed trials for years, and they accused Bush of holding a bill signing that was timed to politically aid the GOP.

Bush acknowledged controversy over the act. "Over the past few months, the debate over this bill has been heated, and the questions raised can seem complex," he said.

But Bush also said, "When I proposed this legislation, I explained that I would have one test for the bill Congress produced: Will it allow the CIA program to continue? This bill meets that test."

Yet the lawyers group Human Rights First, the only such organization to back the act's language on inhumane and cruel treatment, held a news conference to dispute that claim.

The act's language and legislative history would bar tactics such as waterboarding that the CIA reportedly used in the past, said Elisa Massimino, the group's Washington director.

"Some CIA program may go forward," she said, but not one using "abusive interrogation techniques."