The Senate has rejected the Specter Amendment which would have given unlawful combatant detainees acces to the U.S. courts. The story seems unaccountably objective and fair for the New York Hearsay. The lede:

The Senate today rejected an amendment to a bill creating a new system for interrogating and trying terror suspects that would have guaranteed such suspects access to the courts to challenge their imprisonment.

The supporters of the bill denounced the final bill for denying these detainees the right of habeus corpus which is a request for a court to rule on the validity of a person's detention.

Hugh Hewitt has replayed Pat Leahy's speech against the final bill, as unfair and a betrayal of American principles. He obviously has no grasp of who our enemies are, and he seems to feel that allowing the Military System of Justice to handle these individuals means that they're being denied human rights. This is a truly bizarre argument. It suggests that without some liberal federal judge to horn in and make a circus of the case, a captured terrorist is being treated unfairly. Do we really want to extend our Constitution that far? If we had a civil society everywhere, with the rule of law and more or less uncorrupt police and American judges from here to Outer Mongolia and back, we might make that argument, but most of the world still suffers under real tyranny, not the pretend kind invoked by Leahy and his fellows keep invoking here. To listen to them, you'd think that Bush had dissolved Congress and the Courts and seized control of the news media. The very fact that people are able to make such charges and have them broadcast is the surest refutation of them. Sometimes I wonder if our very liberties will destroy us. That seems to be the lesson of history.

Earlier Hugh spoke to Mark Steyn who was en route returning home from a visit to Gitmo. He noted that the prisoners were being interrogated in a La-Z-boy recliner (or "comfy chair").