US: The United States has signalled a shift in its policy on interrogating detainees, saying the same rules apply overseas as in America.
Stung by European criticism of the alleged use of torture in secret CIA prisons, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said in Kiev yesterday that America's obligations under the United Nations Convention against Torture "extend to US personnel wherever they are, whether they are in the United States or outside of the United States".
The Bush administration has in the past suggested that it is only obliged to uphold the convention within US territory and the White House has sought to exempt the CIA from a proposal to outlaw the use of cruel and inhumane interrogation methods by US personnel anywhere in the world.
Ms Rice's statement comes amid reports that the administration has abandoned its campaign against the anti-torture measure, which Republican senator John McCain has proposed as an amendment to a defence spending bill.
The senate voted 90-9 in favour of Mr McCain's amendment and Republican congressmen have told the White House that it also has majority backing in the House of Representatives.
President George W Bush's national security adviser, Stephen Hadley, is now trying to persuade Mr McCain to include language in the amendment that would give covert officers limited protection from prosecution.
The New York Times reported yesterday that Mr McCain has offered to include some language, modelled after military standards, under which soldiers can provide a defence if a "reasonable" person could have concluded that he or she was following a lawful order about how to treat prisoners.
Mr McCain's amendment would oblige military interrogators to follow rules in an army field manual based on the Geneva conventions and all other US personnel to uphold the UN Convention against Torture.
"No individual in the custody or under the physical control of the United States government, regardless of nationality or physical location, shall be subject to cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment or punishment," it says.
The UN convention defines torture as "any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity".
The convention's prohibition of torture is absolute.
"No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat or war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture," it says.
After the attacks on the US on September 11th, 2001, the CIA sought the administration's blessing for the use of tough interrogation techniques against terrorist suspects, such as open-handed slapping, the threat of live burial and "waterboarding", a procedure that involves strapping a detainee to a board, raising the feet above the head and simulating drowning.
In August 2002, the US justice department sent a memo to the White House saying that a coercive technique was torture only if it induced pain equivalent to what a person experiencing death or organ failure might suffer.
The administration revised the guidelines last year but has not made the new rules public.
Thailand yesterday repeated its denial that any secret CIA jails were allowed to operate on their territory. Thailand's justice minister Chidchai Vanasathidya said an ABC News report that the first secret prison was in his country was not true.
"I want to reassure all of you that we do not have a secret jail and there was never any terrorist suspect passing through Thailand," Mr Vanasathidya said.