Last week, the U.S. Senate cancelled Guantanamo prisoners’ right to appeal their detention in civilian courts, giving Bush’s administration limitless powers and a green-light to treat detainees as it wishes.

The Senate added an amendment to a Defense Department budget bill that denies non-U.S. nationals the right to seek redress in civil courts, apparently to prevent a court backlog, reported The Associated Press.

"If we don't rein in prisoner abuse, we're going to lose the war, but if we don't rein in legal abuse by prisoners, we're going undermine our ability to protect ourselves," Republican Senator Lindsey Graham was quoted by AP as saying.

"Do not give the terrorists, the enemy combatants, the people who blow up folks at weddings, who fly airplanes into the twin towers, the ability to sue our own troops all over the country for any and everything."
Human rights campaigners called the move 'November surprise', The Observer said.

Analysts said that denying detainees at Guantanamo Bay or any other U.S. detention center inside or outside America, almost all legal rights, will have its devastating effects.

Speaking from Guantanamo, British lawyer Clive Stafford Smith, who represents more than 40 detainees, said: “What the British law Lord Steyn once called a legal black hole had begun to be filled in,”

“It looks as if it is back, and deeper than before.”

Guantanamo detainees have been categorized by Bush’s admin as “Enemy Combatant” in an attempt to deny them rights they would be granted if held as “prisoners of war”, which entitles them to certain protections under the Geneva Conventions.

Enemy combatant status allows the detention of an individual for the duration of an armed conflict.

The new amendment is another attempt to "save the Bush administration from another embarrassment before the Supreme Court," said Jonathan Turley, a George Washington University law professor.

Undercutting the writ of habeas corpus, which recognizes the right of a person in detention to take his case to the court, sparked criticism even among conservatives.

"The writ of habeas corpus is rightly considered the glory of Anglo-American common law," said a an article published in the Los Angeles Times by David Rifkin and Lee Casey, who used to be members of the Republican administrations under Ronald Reagan and Bush the father.

"So far judicial review of the government's detention policies has not compromised its ability to defend American interests," they wrote.

"There is great value in having the courts affirm the basic legality of the administration's approach," they said.

"The detainee cases have shown a great triumph of an independent judiciary. If there's one area we can point to with some pride since 9/11, it's been the willingness of judges, including Republican judges, to stand up to President Bush and say that he's wrong."

Several Human Rights organisations and senior figures at the U.S. military, including John Hutson, the former Judge Advocate General of the U.S. Navy, and the National Institute for Military Justice, a think-tank for military lawyers, are calling on the Senate to reconsider the amendment, The Observer said.