Pushing the Limits

By Lisa Takeuchi Cullen

Since 9/11, the Administration has deployed aggressive legal and tactical tools to track and hold terrorists. The approach has been criticized in Congress and in the courts.

Enemy Combatants

o CONTROVERSY After 9/11, the Bush Administration asserted that the President had the power to name suspected terrorists captured by the U.S. "enemy combatants" without due process of law and detain them indefinitely. That designation deprives them of protections guaranteed to prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions.

o WHERE THINGS STAND In 2004 the Supreme Court rejected the Administration's argument of Executive authority and gave enemy combatants held at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the right to contest their incarceration in federal court. But a bipartisan bill approved by Congress last month and now before the President will deny foreign terrorism suspects the right to challenge the conditions of their detention in federal court, which some experts say will effectively overturn the Supreme Court ruling.

Torture

o CONTROVERSY While insisting that the U.S. does not practice torture, the Administration fought a congressional effort to ban U.S. forces anywhere from "cruel, inhuman or degrading" treatment of detainees. That, plus an aborted Administration effort to limit the definition of torture to that which inflicts agony just short of the pain of organ failure or death, and photographic evidence that U.S. troops abused prisoners at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison, have created the image of a government tolerant of the practice.

o WHERE THINGS STAND Facing overwhelming support for the torture ban in both houses, the Administration agreed to it in December. A last-minute change added protection from litigation for interrogators. On a recent trip to Europe, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said, "The United States does not condone torture."

Secret Prisons

o CONTROVERSY It had already been made public that certain captured al-Qaeda leaders were held by the U.S. in undisclosed locations, but when the Washington Post reported in November that the CIA had kept suspected terrorists in secret prisons in as many as eight countries, including some in Eastern Europe, a global scandal erupted.

o WHERE THINGS STAND The Administration has neither confirmed nor denied the existence of secret prisons, called "black sites" in classified documents, according to the Post. Fingered by Human Rights Watch as likely hosts, E.U. member Poland and aspiring member Romania denied involvement. The Post said sites in Thailand and Cuba were shut down before its report appeared. The possibility of CIA-run prisons within Europe raised a furor on the Continent, and E.U. leaders have suggested participating countries could face sanctions.

Renditions

o CONTROVERSY Rice has defended rendition--the transfer of prisoners to other countries--as a useful practice when authorities cannot, for various reasons, detain, prosecute or extradite them. Critics of rendition say it is just a euphemism for outsourcing torture.

o WHERE THINGS STAND In the wake of the Post article on secret prisons, most European governments have said their airspace is off limits to CIA flights carrying prisoners to countries practicing torture. A judge in Italy last year ordered 13 CIA operatives arrested after prosectors there said the CIA seized Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr, an Egyptian imam, in Milan and sent him to Egypt, where he claims he was tortured. Although President Bush has said the U.S. seeks assurances that suspects sent abroad won't be tortured, CIA Director Porter Goss has acknowledged that "there's only so much we can do."