A day after the lower House of Representatives passed a largely identical bill, the Senate's 65-34 vote sealed a victory for Bush that lets controversial CIA interrogations of detainees continue. Bush says the programme is vital to US security.
The bill broadly limits the methods the US can use to pry information from detainees, though Bush would have final say on what is allowed. It also creates rules for planned military trials of suspected terrorists in US custody at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Opponents point out that specific methods such as 'waterboarding' - where a detainee feels like he is drowning - are not explicitly banned, and that coerced testimony could be used to convict suspects.
Yet 12 Senate Democrats joined Republicans in supporting the measure. With both chambers now behind the administration, Bush was expected to sign detainee legislation into force within days.
Passage of the Senate bill followed a day of emotional debate. Opponents evoked 18th-century US founders Thomas Jefferson and George Washington in arguing that the measure was unconstitutional and undercut US moral authority in the world.
Fierce dispute erupted over provisions backed by Bush's Republicans that deny foreigners held as 'enemy combatants' a US constitutional right to contest their detention in civilian courts. The restriction includes foreigners legally living in the US.
Opponents of eliminating the so-called habeas corpus right said the move would let the government hold suspects indefinitely without charges or trial.
'This is so wrong. It is unconstitutional. It is un-American,' Democrat Patrick Leahy said during the debate. 'It makes a mockery of the Bush-Cheney administration's lofty rhetoric about exporting freedom around the globe.'
The CIA's 'black sites' outside the US to detain and question terror suspects after the September 11, 2001 attacks caused international outrage when media reports exposed them last year.
Abuses at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison and reports of harsh interrogations at Guantanamo had previously raised questions about US anti-terror tactics.
Bush says the CIA programme has provided intelligence that allowed the US to foil further terror attacks since September 11.
But even Republican Senator Gordon Smith warned Thursday that wilful detention had been 'a tool of despotism' in the past.
A Democratic proposal to restore habeas-corpus protection narrowly failed Thursday, 51 votes to 48.
A broader point of contention is whether the new law forces US interrogators to abide by the ban on cruel or inhumane treatment contained in the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of prisoners.
High-profile warnings against redefining the 1949 treaty have come from Bush's former secretary of state Colin Powell and senior US military lawyers.
But John McCain, a Republican senator who was tortured as a prisoner in the Vietnam War, said he was confident that the measure outlawed practices such as waterboarding and would keep the US within the Geneva Conventions.
'Our national security demands that we pass this bill,' Senate Republican leader Bill Frist said. 'We need this tool in the war on terror.'
And giving foreign terror suspects the full run of the US court system would encourage 'frivolous litigation and appeals,' Republican John Cornyn told his colleagues.
Suspects could appeal within the system of 'military commissions' backed by the new legislation and to a Washington federal court that could review their 'enemy combatant' status, Cornyn said.
The legislation was prompted by a US Supreme Court ruling in June that the Bush administration's detainee policy violated US law and the 1949 Geneva Conventions on the treatment of prisoners.
Bush acknowledged the CIA programme this month when he said that 14 al-Qaeda suspects - including alleged September 11 mastermind Khaled Sheikh Mohammed - had been moved from CIA detention to the US base at Guantanamo Bay for planned military trials.
Of the roughly 450 Guantanamo detainees, 10 have been charged.
Bush has pressed lawmakers to finish the detainee bill before they break Saturday ahead of November 7 Congressional elections, where Republicans are fighting to keep their majority in both chambers.
Some Democrats charged that the political calendar was dictating policy.
'There's no new national security crisis, there's only apparently a Republican political crisis,' complained Senator Leahy.
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