WASHINGTON, 8 September 2006 — An unlikely chorus comprising fellow Republicans and human rights groups criticized US President George Bush’s long-awaited plan for military commissions to try foreign terrorist suspects yesterday.

Some Republicans say Bush’s plan omits many of the usual safeguards of a military trial, and does not go far enough to protect prisoners. It would ban evidence obtained by coercion, for example. Administration officials, however, have said that allowing coerced testimony in some cases may be necessary.

Human rights groups offered the harshest criticism. They said Bush’s plan too closely mirrored the tribunal arrangement struck down by the Supreme Court on June 29.

“The draft may say it’s modeled on the Uniform Code of Military Justice, but it’s a pale imitation,” said Deborah Pearlstein of Human Rights First.

Bush’s proposal would bar defendants from court hearings where classified evidence is discussed. During Senate Armed Services Committee hearings in July, committee members voiced opposition to the idea.

“I do not think we can afford to again cut legal corners that will result in federal court rejection of our work product,” said Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who with fellow Republican Senators John McCain of Arizona and John Warner of Virginia has been most critical of the president’s position on tribunals.

The three senators expressed optimism about a compromise. Warner, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, said he hoped to introduce a bipartisan bill soon and said Congress could pass a bill before members go home to campaign for the Nov. 7 election.

The president sent to Congress yesterday legislation prosing new rules of the commissions and detailing specific standards for the humane treatment of detainees.

Critics say the proposal is similar to the old model and it retains several provisions the Supreme Court found problematic, including language that permits defendants to be excluded from their own trials. The Senate Armed Services Committee opposes this idea.

The Supreme Court justices said that the proposed tribunals violate the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which affords such protections as the right to be present at trials, and the Geneva Conventions, which the court said may give detainees the same rights as US citizens facing military trial.

The Supreme Court’s ruling has “put in question the future of the CIA program,” Bush said. He said he wants the program to continue “within the letter of the law.”

“The Supreme Court ruling against the president, especially when you remember many of the appointees were made by him and his father, shows that you cannot go against the US constitution — which is being violated by this administration — and expect the world to respect you,” said Mary Rose Oakar, president of the Washington-based American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee.

“Americans love the fact that we have a constitution that protects our rights, but when you see elements of our constitution violated, it is very disturbing, and polls are showing that the American people are catching on to this,” said Oakar.

Another area of disagreement may be in Bush’s proposal to bar defendants from court hearings where classified evidence is discussed.

The US military’s top legal officers yesterday criticized the White House plan because it would allow convictions based on evidence never seen by the defendants.

The military judge advocates general, senior legal advisers to their branches of the armed forces, told Congress the plan failed to give suspects enough legal rights because it restricted their access to evidence.

However, a US Justice Department official said some restrictions were necessary and justified. The right to a full and fair hearing requires the accused have access to the evidence used to convict them, even if it is classified information, the military advisors told the US House of Representatives Armed Services Committee. “I’m not aware of any situation in the world where there is a system of jurisprudence that is recognized by civilized people where an individual can be tried and convicted without seeing the evidence against him,” said Brig. Gen. James Walker, US Marine Corps staff judge advocate.

“I don’t think the United States needs to become the first in that scenario,” he said.

Similar criticism came from Georgetown University law professor Neal Katyal, who represented Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a Yemeni national accused of being a driver of Osama Bin Laden.

His case led to the rejection of the original Bush plan for military tribunals.

Katyal said the administration was shunning fundamental rules used in World War II tribunals. “We’ve had a tradition that we don’t kick criminals out of their trials,” he said.

However, Bush seems recalcitrant, almost daring the Supreme Court to take him on while reminding Americans that this country is at war with terrorism.

With less than nine weeks until congressional elections, the president turned the topic away from subjects that are unpopular among the American public into the only major area in which Americans continue to give him and the GOP high marks.

In a speech about secret CIA prisons and terrorists’ tribunals, he invokes the approaching fifth anniversary of 9/11 and argued that his administration’s handling of the terrorist threat has succeeded in protecting Americans from another attack on US soil.

Now results of the elections may well hinge on whether Bush’s new move proves effective.

And some are applauding his most recent plan to form these tribunals.

Jay Sekulow of the American Center for Law and Justice told reporters the proposal will “protect the integrity of the process for all involved while at the same time protecting vital national security interests.”

Vin Weber, a top GOP strategist and lobbyist, told reporters the White House “has substantially stepped up its effort to win the argument in the country about the war on terror.”

But Bill Galston, a Democratic analyst, was skeptical that the president would have much success changing voters’ negative impressions of the war in Iraq.

“If the facts on the ground are bad enough at home and abroad, then the most artful presidential framing will not alter people’s judgments, and that’s where I think people are,” Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute, told reporters.

Meanwhile, the international community was grappling yesterday with Bush’s admission that the CIA has been rendering terrorism suspects in secret prisons.

European lawmakers demanded to know the exact location of the secret prisons Bush revealed the CIA operated overseas to interrogate terror suspects in what critics said was a system tacitly approving torture.

The Swiss senator who led a Council of Europe investigation called the admission by Bush of the existence of the secret detention centers “just one piece of the truth.”

Critics said Bush’s acknowledgment of the program and justification of tough interrogation measures vindicated the worst fears that Washington had gone too far in the pursuit of terror suspects.

Bush seemed to be trying to justify “impunity legislation” that would allow the CIA to continue to operate the centers and use “alternative techniques” of interrogation, said Robert Freer, of Amnesty International.

He noted Bush did not rule out cruel, degrading and inhuman prisoner treatment even if he proclaimed, “The United States does not torture.”

Kenneth Roth, executive director of New York-based Human Rights Watch, said there remained the possibility of the CIA using practices that are deemed as torture under international law, such as water-boarding (where suspects are submerged underwater water for periods of time, which has been used against detainees by US interrogators in Iraq and Afghanistan).

Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, who pulled his country’s troops from Iraq after he came to office in 2004, said, “The fight against terrorism can only be done through democracy and respect for the law. It is not compatible with the existence of secret prisons.”

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who met with Zapatero in Madrid yesterday, was more reserved, but said, “I cannot believe that there can be a trade between the effective fight against terrorism and protection of civil liberties. If as individuals we are asked to give up our freedom, our liberties, our human rights, as protection against terrorism, do we in the end have protection?”

In Europe, lawmakers demanded to know the exact location of the secret prisons Bush revealed.

Dick Marty, the Swiss senator who heads the Council of Europe’s investigation into whether European governments collaborated in the secret prison program, said, “There is more, much more to be revealed.”

Marty said earlier this year that 14 European nations — spanning from Dublin to Berlin to Bucharest — colluded with US intelligence in a “spider’s web” of human rights abuses to help the CIA spirit terror suspects to illegal detention facilities.

His claims triggered a wave of angry denials, including from the United States.

Marty said he thought the timing of Bush’s admission was politically motivated. “It probably has to do with the fact that the elections are coming up in the United States,” he said.

- Additional input from agencies