Detainee safeguards defended

WASHINGTON — The CIA and the White House yesterday defended the practice of secretly transferring suspected terrorists to other countries and said proper safeguards exist to ensure detainees are not tortured.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan would not say whether President Bush was aware of — or believed or discounted — assertions made recently by freed detainees that they were tortured by other governments after they were transferred to them by the CIA. But he said the United States has "an obligation not to render people to countries if we believe they're going to be tortured."

It is illegal under U.S. and international law to send someone to a country where torture is likely. The CIA obtains a verbal assurance of humane treatment from the intelligence service of another country before it transfers suspected terrorists, a practice called "rendition." Many intelligence and counterterrorism experts, however, say such assurances are ineffective and virtually impossible to monitor.

CIA renditions and interrogations came up yesterday as the Senate Armed Services Committee questioned CIA Director Porter Goss. Republicans and Democrats asked Goss why the CIA's inspector general was taking so long to review cases of alleged abuse, whether torture ever produced reliable information and whether CIA interrogation rules are clear to operatives in the field and conform with U.S. law.

Goss said the policies and procedures are clear and always within the law. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., expressed skepticism: "Well, some of those policies at one time were to make one have the prisoner feel that they were drowning."

"You're getting into, again," said Goss, "an area of what I will call professional interrogation techniques, and I would like ... "

"That's the area that I'm concerned about," McCain shot back, "because I'm not sure that the interrogators are fully aware of specific policies as to what they can and cannot do when interrogating a prisoner. And that's my point."

Goss said any uncertainty "is largely resolved," but in any case, "anything that would be happening would be erring on the side of caution."

Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., de-

clared: "I have to tell you I am losing a little patience with what appears to me to be an almost pathological obsession with calling into question the actions of men and women who are on the front lines of the war on terror."