US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice today said the Bush administration would use "every lawful means" to combat international terrorism but did not condone torture.
"We have an obligation to defend our people and we will use every lawful means to do so," Mr Rice said after talks with German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin.
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, in a rare concession to US critics, acknowledged today that Washington may make mistakes in its battle against terrorism and promised to put them right if they happened.
But she restated her defence of the legality of US tactics against a militant enemy which "operates from within our society and is intent... on killing innocent civilians".
"Any policy will sometimes result in errors, and when it happens, we will do everything we can to rectify it," Ms Rice said at the start of a European tour overshadowed by allegations of illegal CIA methods against terrorist suspects.
Speaking in Berlin, she declined to comment on the case of a German man, Khaled el-Masri, who was allegedly abducted to Afghanistan and imprisoned there for five months last year until the CIA realised it had got the wrong man.
But German Chancellor Angela Merkel said the US government had acknowledged it blundered over Mr Masri, who plans to sue the CIA in a case to be filed in the United States later today.
Ms Rice was not challenged directly over reports the United States had run secret prisons to hold terrorism suspects in eastern Europe, which Washington has refused to confirm or deny.
But she defended US methods in its struggle against militants. "If you don't get to them before they commit their crimes, they will commit mass murder," she said. "We have an obligation to defend our people and we will use every lawful means to do so." She stressed that the United States operated strictly "within the context of laws and our international obligations".
In comments over the past two days, Ms Rice has sought to shift from defence to attack over US tactics, countering criticism by telling Europeans that US intelligence also prevents attacks and saves lives in their own countries. Europe's leading human rights watchdog is checking out press reports on CIA secret prisons, as well as flights by CIA planes across the continent which it believes may have been used to transport terrorist suspects covertly.
The European Union as a whole, and at least eight member states separately, have sought clarification from Washington.
Amnesty International has called on the Irish Government to inspect flights chartered by the CIA that land in Shannon airport to ensure they are not carrying torture victims. Amnesty International claimed that six CIA-chartered aircraft have landed 50 times at Shannon and made 800 flights into western European airspace.
Last week, Ms Rice, guaranteed Minister for Foreign Affairs Dermot Ahern that Shannon had not been used by the US for "untoward" purposes, or to carry detainees on to destinations for torture.
Later today, Ms Rice visits Romania, a country the campaign group Human Rights Watch says may have hosted a secret prison. Bucharest has issued repeated denials. Ms Rice praised Romania as "very fierce in the war on terror" but declined to discuss any specific intelligence operation.
Human rights groups say incommunicado detention is illegal and often leads to torture, stoking concern in Europe, where there is already widespread criticism of US treatment of detainees in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Tom Malinowski, Washington advocacy director of Human Rights Watch, said Ms Rice could not deny the secret prisons existed. "But she can't say where they are because that would embarrass the United States and put the host countries in an impossible position - something the Bush administration should have thought of when it launched this shortsighted policy."
A new television report last night cited current and former CIA officials saying eleven al-Qaeda suspects had been held in Europe until last month but were then transferred to north Africa. According to ABC News, eight top al-Qaeda figures and three others were held at one time at a former Soviet air base in Eastern Europe and some were later moved to a second country.
ABC News reported secret CIA prisons in Europe were shut down last month after media reports of their existence. It added that interrogation techniques used included sleep deprivation and a practice in which the subject feels they are being drowned, but that these were not classified as torture. The CIA declined comment.