Senate hearings on detention to come

Following the uproar over Amnesty International's declaration that Guantanamo prison is the "gulag of our times," Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, is reported to be planning hearings for sometime this month on the detention of foreigners there. An AP story released this tidbit of information, with little more detail. (N. B. Specter is a centrist, pro-choice Republican who was vigorously attacked by the extreme right in his last re-election campaign.)

Specter, according to an aide, is in the preliminary stages of drafting a bill to establish procedures for detentions and exploring the possibility of making the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Court the venue for challenging them.