WASHINGTON, Sept. 21 (UPI) -- While a Bush administration-supported U.S. military tribunal bill stalled in a House committee, a gentler version just missed passing in a Senate committee.
A bill pushed by House Armed Services Committee Chairman Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., which some argue is inconsistent with the protections for detainees provided by the Geneva Conventions, lost by 20-17 a vote in the House Judiciary Committee and will not now go immediately to the floor.
The bill would provide for the prosecution of what the U.S. military calls "unlawful combatants" -- terror suspects held at the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba detention center -- by special military commissions. Defendants would not have a right to see all the evidence against them if it involved classified information. It would also allow coerced evidence to be presented.
In the Senate, a bill drafted by Sens. John Warner R-Va., John McCain, R-Ariz., and Lindsay Graham, R-S.C., lost a committee vote by 18-17.
Two Democrats were absent from the vote.
The Senate bill, which the White House has opposed, would allow defendants to see summaries of classified evidence, and human rights advocates say it is consistent with the Geneva Conventions.
Caroline Fredrickson, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Washington legislative office, said that it was a bad sign for the Bush administration that a competing bill was so close to passing.
It is a "dramatic indication of the difficulties this administration is facing when you have a committee so dominated by the president's supporters and where the chairman of the committee is a co-sponsor of the committee's bill, and you have an alternative proposal so close to passing," said Fredrickson.
