Senate OKs $1-Billion Anti-Terrorism Measure

Offering a tribute to the victims of the Oklahoma City bombing, the Senate on Wednesday overwhelmingly approved a $1-billion anti-terrorism measure that would make it easier to track and punish terrorists and hasten executions of convicts on death row.

The bill, which passed 91 to 8, now goes to the House, where it is expected to win approval by Friday, the first anniversary of the bombing that killed 168 people at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building and awakened the nation to the threat of home-grown terrorism.

President Clinton has indicated that he will sign the measure, even though it excludes several provisions initially requested by his administration--including expanded authority to wiretap suspected terrorists and mandatory use of “taggants” to track explosive materials.

Those provisions and others were removed at the insistence of House conservatives who feared the original measure would give too much authority and discretion to federal officials.

The final legislation includes provisions enabling the government to speedily deport foreign citizens who are suspected terrorists and prohibiting any person or organization within the United States from raising or providing funds for designated terrorist groups. The measure would make it a federal offense to transfer explosives to another person with the knowledge they will be used to commit a violent crime.

The bill also makes it easier to track and punish terrorists. Various provisions allow crimes committed overseas to be prosecuted in the United States if part of the conspiracy took place in this country and authorize the attorney general to extradite alleged foreign terrorists even in the absence of an extradition treaty. Other parts of the legislation allow the Immigration and Naturalization Service to release confidential information for law enforcement purposes and grant $940 million in new counterterrorist funding for the FBI, the INS, the Customs Service, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Justice Department.

But one senator said the initiatives of most interest to the families of the Oklahoma City victims were not the anti-terrorism provisions, but the new restrictions on federal death row appeals by state prisoners, known as habeas corpus petitions.

“The families of the victims have said we need habeas corpus reform,” said Sen. Don Nickles (R-Okla.). It is important to them, Nickles added, because they want to ensure that if the defendants are given the death penalty, their sentences will be “carried out in normal time and not 20 years from now.”

That provision, which strips federal judges of most of their power to review the cases of state death row inmates, was aimed at halting the seemingly endless appeals such convicts have been allowed in the past.

“The people of this country are sick and tired of murderers being put on death row and then sitting there . . . at enormous expense to American taxpayers,” said Sen. Lauch Faircloth (R-N.C.).

Under the new measure, inmates will be given only one chance to appeal to federal court unless there is new evidence that gives “clear and convincing” proof of innocence. Also, they will have only one year to file their appeals in federal court.

The Clinton administration expressed concerns about this provision, but the president has indicated that it would not prevent him from signing the measure.

“We have a measure that will give us a strong upper-hand in the battle to prevent and punish domestic and international terrorism,” said Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.).

But Democrats, who waged a day-and-a-half attempt to send the bill back to committee to reinstate the provisions that had been stripped out, were less laudatory.

“If we cannot enact a strong and decisive anti-terrorism bill, this measure will do at least some good,” said Sen. Herbert Kohl (D-Wis.). “But the record should be clear--crystal clear--that we should have done better.”

The measure was originally conceived in response to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing in New York and was focused on foreign terrorism. But after the Oklahoma City blast, it was broadened to include provisions directed at countering domestic terrorism as well.

The Senate approved a tough anti-terrorism measure that included many of the initiatives sought by the president. But in the House, an unusual alliance of liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans succeeded in watering down the measure, stripping out many provisions they contended would give the government too much authority to infringe on constitutional freedoms and intrude in Americans’ lives.

The compromise version approved by the Senate restored some measures rejected by the House and was the result of many weeks of difficult negotiations in a conference committee.

Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah), the chairman of the Judiciary Committee and manager of the bill on the floor, repeatedly urged his colleagues not to send the measure back to the conference committee, saying Congress should honor the victims of the Oklahoma City bombing by passing the measure before the anniversary of the tragedy.

“Do we want to do something about terrorism or do we want to kill the bill? That’s what it comes down to,” Hatch said, contending that members of the House would reject all of the additions Democrats wanted to make.

The measures Democrats wanted inserted included provisions to:

* Forbid anyone to use computer networks, such as the Internet, to publish instructions on making bombs.

* Authorize the attorney general to request military assistance in cases involving chemical or biological weapons.

* Give the government authority to order a wiretap on any phone that a specific person might use, rather than a specific phone.

* Lengthen from three to five years the statute of limitations on prosecutions for illegally making a bomb, a silencer or a sawed-off shotgun.

Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.), who led the opposition, argued that the bill did not provide law enforcement officials with enough new tools to prevent acts of terrorism.

“We should be worried about future victims,” Biden said. “What about future Oklahomas?”

During the debate on the measure, senators from Oklahoma reminded their colleagues that the survivors and families of the victims of the Oklahoma City bombing had called on them to pass such a bill.

The legislation includes a special provision designed to accommodate survivors and families of the victims of the Oklahoma bombing who find it difficult to attend the Denver trial of the suspects in the case, Timothy J. McVeigh and Terry L. Nichols.

The bill requires that when the venue of trials is changed, the court must provide closed-circuit television viewings of the proceedings in the original venue for victims and their families.

“They want to be able to view the trial and not have to move their families to Denver,” Nickles said. “This is good news for them.”