"The evidence did not support assertions that Able Danger identified the September 11, 2001 terrorists nearly a year before the attack, that Able Danger team members were prohibited from sharing information with law enforcement authorities, or that DoD officials reprised against (Lieutenant Colonel) Shaffer for his disclosures regarding Able Danger," the acting inspector general Thomas Gimble said in a letter.

The inspector general's report, dated September 18, was released Thursday.

The allegations caused a furor when they first surfaced in news reports in August 2005 and were championed vociferously by Representative Curt Weldon, a Republican from Pennsylvania.

They reinforced the view that the attacks might have been prevented if Atta's supposed presence in the United States as part of a Brooklyn cell had been passed on to law enforcement authorities.

"We concluded that prior to September 11, 2001, Able Danger team members did not identify Mohammed Atta or any other 9/11 hijacker," the inspector general's report said.

Four witnesses remembered seeing Atta's name or photo on a chart that identified terrorist cells, including a Brooklyn cell, the report said.

The report concluded that the chart was one produced by a contractor in May 2000 which showed the names or photographs of 53 terrorists, but not Atta's or that of any other 9/11 hijacker.

It said it found that the witnesses recollections were not accurate.

Their testimony "varied significantly from each other, and in some instances testimony obtained in reinterviews was inconsistent with testimony that witnesses provided earlier."

"In particular, we found inaccurate (Lieutenant Colonel) Shaffer's assertions regarding the existence of pre-9/11 information on the terrorists and his suggestion that DoD officials thwarted efforts to share Able Danger information with law enforce authorities," the report said.

"All witnesses who were in a position to know denied (Lieutenant Colonel) Shaffer's claim that efforts to meet with FBI antiterrorism units were made, much less thwarted by DoD officials," it said.

The DIA halted Shaffer's access to classified information in September, 2005 after the first stories appeared. His security clearance was formally revoked in February, ending his career as an intelligence officer.

But the inspector general found that those actions were based on other unidentified misconduct and would have been justified regardless of the Able Danger disclosures.

The accord, however, explicitly states the president has the authority to enforce Geneva Convention standards and enumerates acts that constitute a war crime, including torture, rape, biological experiments and cruel and inhuman treatment. White House officials said these provisions would provide the CIA the clarity it needs to continue with its interrogation program.

The pact follows more than a week of squabbling among Republicans that had threatened to derail an anti-terrorism agenda put together by the White House and GOP leaders going into the Nov. 7 elections. It was announced at a time when support for Bush's proposal in the GOP-run Congress had been crumbling, but the agreement could lead to enactment of one of Bush's top remaining priorities of the year.

The House and Senate are expected to vote next week on the legislation.

"I'm pleased to say that this agreement preserves the single most potent tool we have in protecting America and foiling terrorist attacks," the president said after the agreement was announced.

Sen. John McCain of Arizona, one of three GOP lawmakers who told Bush he couldn't have the legislation the way he initially asked for it, said the deal "gives the president the tools he needs to continue to fight the war on terror and bring these evil people to justice."

"There's no doubt that the integrity and letter and spirit of the Geneva Conventions have been preserved," McCain said, referring to the international treaties covering the treatment of prisoners in wartime.

The central sticking point had been a demand from McCain, Sen. John Warner of Virginia and Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina that there be no attempt to redefine U.S. obligations under the Geneva Conventions.

CIA Director Michael Hayden praised the deal a week after saying his agency needed to be confident that its interrogation program for high-value terror suspects is legal.

"If this language becomes law, the Congress will have given us the clarity and the support that we need to move forward with a detention and interrogation program that allows us to continue to defend the homeland, attack al-Qaida and protect American and allied lives," he wrote to CIA personnel.

Added Stephen Hadley, the president's national security adviser, on CIA interrogations: "The good news is the program will go forward."

Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., indicated he was not satisfied with the piece on classified information: "We're going to look at it closely. And we have some recommendations with respect to classified information."

Hadley said the bar would be "very high" and that classified information would not be automatically shared with terrorists.

"Our view is we think it's a good approach because the likelihood of that occurring would be very remote," Hadley said.

Bush expressed support for the deal before microphones in Orlando, Fla., where he was campaigning for Republican candidates.

The agreement "clears the way to do what the American people expect us to do - to capture terrorists, to detain terrorists, to question terrorists and then to try them," he said.

The accord was sealed in a 90-minute session in the office of Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, who had earlier in the day told Warner, McCain and Graham it was time to close the deal. The four lawmakers were joined by Hadley, as well as other administration officials, for the final session.

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said Democrats backed the GOP's efforts to bring terrorists to justice. "Five years after 9/11, it is time to make the tough and smart decisions to give the American people the real security they deserve," Reid said.

The agreement was hailed by human rights groups.

"Today's agreement makes clear that the president cannot unilaterally downgrade the humane treatment standards of the Geneva Conventions," said Elisa Massimino, Washington director of Human Rights First.

Whatever the outcome, the controversy has handed critics of the president's conduct of the war on terror election-year ammunition.

Bush's former secretary of state, Colin Powell, dismayed the administration when he sided with Warner, McCain and Graham. He said Bush's plan, which would have formally changed the U.S. view of the Geneva Conventions on rules of warfare, would cause the world "to doubt the moral basis" of the fight against terror and "put our own troops at risk."

The handling of suspects is one of two administration priorities relating to the war on terror.

The other involves the president's request for legislation to explicitly allow wiretapping without a court warrant on international calls and e-mails between suspected terrorists in the United States and abroad. One official said Republicans had narrowed their differences with the White House over that issue, as well, and hoped for an agreement soon.

Republican leaders have said they intend to adjourn Congress by the end of the month to give lawmakers time to campaign for re-election.

The Supreme Court ruled in June that Bush's plan for trying terrorism suspects before military tribunals violated the Geneva Conventions and U.S. law.

The court, in a 5-3 ruling, found that Congress had not given Bush the authority to create the special type of military trial and that the president did not provide a valid reason for the new system. The justices also said the proposed trials did not provide for minimum legal protections under international law.

About 450 terrorism suspects, most of them captured in Afghanistan and none of them in the U.S., are being held by military authorities at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Ten have been charged with crimes.

Musharraf, in an interview with CBS news magazine show "60 Minutes" that will air Sunday, said the threat came from Assistant Secretary of State Richard Armitage and was given to Musharraf's intelligence director.

"The intelligence director told me that (Armitage) said, 'Be prepared to be bombed. Be prepared to go back to the Stone Age,"' Musharraf said.

"I think it was a very rude remark."

The Pakistani leader, whose remarks were distributed to the media by CBS, said he reacted to the threat in a responsible way.

"One has to think and take actions in the interest of the nation, and that's what I did," Musharraf said about the cooperation extended by Pakistan.

Musharraf said some demands made by the United States were "ludicrous," including one insisting he suppress domestic expression of support for terrorism against the United States.

"If somebody's expressing views, we cannot curb the expression of views," Musharraf said.

Copyright 2006 Reuters News Service.

Some of the most serious allegations of torture concern the treatment of Shaker Aamer, a Saudi national who until his arrest four years ago had been living in London with his wife and four children.

In June this year, Mr Aamer claims he was badly beaten and tortured because he failed to provide a retina scan and fingerprints to the camp authorities. He says he was strapped to a chair, fully restrained at the head, arms and legs.

The habeas corpus motion filed in the court of the District of Columbia states: "The MPs [military police] inflicted so much pain, Mr Aamer said he thought he was going to die. The MPs pressed on pressure points all over his body: his temples, just under his jawline, in the hollow beneath his ears. They choked him. They bent his nose so hard he thought it would break.

"They pinched his thighs and feet constantly. They gouged his eyes. They held his eyes open and shined a Maglite [torch] in them for minutes on end, generating intense heat. They bent his fingers until he screamed. When he screamed, they cut off his airway, then put a mask on him so he could not cry out."

Mr Aamer, who had been resident in Britain since 1996, was used as key negotiator on behalf of the prisoners during recent hunger strikes.

But when a settlement between the prisoners and the guards broke down last year he was sent to solitary confinement. This month he was visited by his lawyer from the human rights charity Reprieve. Mr Aamer told the lawyer that he had not seen the sun for 79 days and had had no meaningful contact with the outside world.

In a harrowing account of his torture he said: "At any moment, they can strip you naked. They will put your head in the toilet in the name of security. It is all about humiliation. They are trying to break me."

Bisher al-Rawi, another British resident captured by the Americans in Gambia after alleged collusion between the CIA and MI5 officers, is also being held in solitary confinement at another detention centre known as Camp V.

Mr al-Rawi has stopped co-operating with his interrogators because they are still seeking answers to the same questions they were asking when he was first arrested in 2002.

His resistance has cost him the few privileges he had and led to his interrogators using torture lasting for weeks. The most common form of torture he has been forced to endure is the use of extreme temperatures in the cells. During the day the guards let the temperatures reach 100 degrees and in the night take away his sheet and use the air conditioning system to create freezing conditions

Zachary Katznelson, the Reprieve lawyer who interviewed the men in Guantanamo, said the torture had been so severe that Mr Al Rawi had suffered wheezing and loss of consciousness.

The evidence relating to Mr al-Rawi is to be used to support an appeal already lodged at the High Court in London. Two other British residents, Omar Deghayes and Ahmed Errachidi, are also being held in Camp V.

Ahmed Belbacha and Abdennour Sameur are in Camp II. Jamil al-Banna is in Camp IV, the lowest security rated part of the prison. An eighth man, Binyam Mohamed, is due to appear before a military commission. All the men remain defiant and protest their innocence.

Reprieve, the British based human rights charity representing the men, says their detention is a gross breach of international law and an infringement of the Geneva Conventions.

Trevor Paglen, an expert in clandestine military installations, and A.C. Thompson, an award-winning journalist for S.F. Weekly, spent months tracking the CIA flights and the businesses behind them. What they found was a startlingly broad network of planes (including the Gulfstream jet belonging to Boston Red Sox co-owner Phillip Morse), shell companies, and secret prisons around the world. Perhaps the most disturbing revelation of their new book Torture Taxi: On the Trail of the CIA's Rendition Flights is the collusion of everyday Americans in this massive CIA program. From family lawyers who bolster the shell companies, to an entire town in Smithfield, N.C., that hosts CIA planes and pilots, Torture Taxi is the story of the broad reach of extraordinary rendition, and, as Hannah Arendt coined the phrase, the banality of evil.

Trevor and A.C. joined me by phone to explain how they managed to follow a paper trail that led to some of the most critical unknowns about the extraordinary rendition program.

Onnesha Roychoudhuri: How did the idea for the book come about?

Trevor Paglen: I research military secrecy at Berkeley and there is a community there trying to figure out what military programs are. At some point, this hobbyist community became aware that there were these civilian planes flying around, acting as if they were working in military black programs. These people started tracking the planes and repeatedly seeing them in places like Libya and Guantanamo Bay. It became pretty clear that this was a CIA thing and that these were planes that were involved in the extraordinary rendition program.

Roychoudhuri: When did the pieces start to come together?

Paglen: Late last year, there was a big uproar about secret prisons in Eastern Europe. Dana Priest at the Washington Post broke the story and Human Rights Watch put out a press release. At that moment the pieces started making sense and we could start explaining what was going on. By that time I had collected a number of files on this just as a curiosity. I brought them over to A.C.'s job, where he has access to some tools to do investigative journalism.

A.C. Thompson: Trevor had this aviation and military expertise and all this information when he came to my office. I've been doing corporate research for years and when we started looking at these possible CIA front companies associated with the planes, it immediately became very apparent that we were looking at phony companies.

Roychoudhuri: How did you track the extraordinary rendition program?

Thompson: We wanted to gather up as much information as we could to create this mosaic of evidence to show the broad picture of extraordinary rendition. We went from Smithfield, N.C., to Gardez, Afghanistan, to piece it together. This is something that people have only really had snapshots of thus far. We reverse-engineered the program. We used the paper trails and evidence left behind, from FAA flight logs to the testimony of former prisoners in Afghanistan to piece it all together.

Paglen: We conceived of the book as a travel diary. We showed up at the addresses on this paper trail and followed the leads. The point was to find the story behind the address. Then we would go to the places where those companies actually fly those airplanes and provide the pilots. Then, when we saw that the airplanes frequently landed in Afghanistan, we went there, too.

Roychoudhuri: You relied on data from amateur plane-spotters with data from all over the world. Can you explain how that works?

Paglen: There are many plane-spotting websites with data regarding the movements of these aircrafts along with pictures. The data can be very scattered and difficult to do much with. But some of these plane-spotters have developed advanced techniques to get information on aircraft movement. That became very helpful in piecing some of this together. If you are a plane-spotter and you are interested in the history of a particular aircraft, you know there are many documents publicly available: registration papers and airworthiness certificates from the FAA. You can also get flight data from the FAA. And in the cases that data has been blocked, people have figured out ways to get around those blocks. When the plane-spotter community and journalists came together, it became one of the few ways to see the outlines of this program.

Roychoudhuri: The fact that the CIA is using civilian planes actually makes it easier to track them.

Paglen: Civilian law around aviation is much looser than those governing military. Civilian planes can basically fly wherever they want in the world. The U.S. military needs special permission to fly over somebody else's airspace. Using the civilian companies is a way to create mobility and avoid drawing attention.

Thompson: The CIA wants to exist in the civilian world. It wants to create these entities so that it can move without a lot of scrutiny. But in the civilian world, you have to interact with other parts of the government all the time. If you create a shell corporation that is going to supposedly own an airplane that will be used to transport people to dungeons around the world, you have to file incorporation papers with the state the company is based in. When you go and get these corporate papers, you can analyze things like the signatures on the documents.

Roychoudhuri: What did you find when you examined some of these documents?

Thompson: We found Colleen Bornt who was an exec at a company called Premier Executive Transport Services. Premier was the company that owned the plane that took Khaled el-Masri to the Salt Pit. When you go look at the paper documents that Colleen signed, you find that every one of her signatures looks completely different. That's because each one was made by a different person. When we started looking for more traces of Colleen there was no home address, no phone number, nor any other proof that she's existed at all.

That's the same with all these companies. They don't have real headquarters, staff or anything besides these paper documents they filed to incorporate and a handful of lawyers who helped set these companies up and serve as the registered agents for them. These are the people who receive summons and subpoenas for the companies.

Roychoudhuri: What are these lawyers?

Thompson: These lawyers are the only humans you can find who actually exist in these companies. We went to look to talk to people at Keeler and Tate, another shell company implicated in el-Masri's abduction. Keeler and Tate were sued by el-Masri with the help of the ACLU. We went to the only address for Keeler and Tate--a law office in Reno, Nevada. We told the secretary "One of the lawyers here is a registered agent and you have been named in a lawsuit alleging a connection to the CIA and extraordinary rendition, what do you think of that?" She didn't seem at all surprised, but she threw us out pretty quickly.

Roychoudhuri: Who are these lawyers?

Thompson: The kind of people we're talking about are Dean Plakias in Dedham, Mass., outside of Boston. He is not a high-profile guy. He's a family lawyer with a small practice and how he ended up in this world is still a mystery. This is an American story, a neighborhood story. When we started looking at all the front companies the CIA had erected, we realized our neighbors were helping the CIA set up these structures. These are family lawyers in suburban Massachusetts and Reno, Nevada. People in our communities are doing dirty work for the CIA. This is not just people being snatched up from one faraway country and taken to a country that's even farther away.

Roychoudhuri: When you have a false entity like Colleen Bornt signing for purchases of planes, is that breaking business laws?

Thompson: As far as I can tell, it's 100% illegal under the business and professions codes in any state. I don't think that it would be legal anywhere. I also don't think that it's legal in any state for a lawyer to set up a phony business for people who they know don't exist. It's also likely at odds with the ethics provisions of most state bar organizations for lawyers. Strictly speaking, I don't think any of these things are legal.

Roychoudhuri: Where was the most interesting place you traveled?

Thompson: We went to Nevada, Massachusetts and New York to track down the front companies. We went to Beale Air Force base in Northern California to track U2 spy planes. We went to Smithfield, N.C, which is home to the airfields that many of these airplanes fly out of. Then we went to Kabul and Gardez, Afghanistan.

But the two most interesting places were the rural town of Smithfield and Kinston down the road, where there's another airstrip that a company called Aero Contractors uses. Aero is the company that flies many of these missions for the CIA. We went there and talked to a pilot who had worked for Aero about exactly what they did and how the program worked. There's nothing random about the CIA using this rural area in North Carolina. If you wanted to shut up a secret operation, this is where you would do it. It's a God, guns and guts area.

Roychoudhuri: When you asked questions, what kind of answers did you get?

Thompson: What you start to figure out by spending time in Smithfield is that a lot of people know about the company and have at least an inkling of what goes on at the airport. Most don't want to talk about it and don't take a critical view of it. Folks we met there framed the debate within this religious discourse. The activists that we talked to were god-fearing devout Christians who felt like this was not what they signed up for as religious people, that it violates the religious tenets they adhere to. Interestingly, folks on the other side of the debate seem to be coming from a similar place, but just coming to a different conclusion. The subject of whether or not torture was permitted by the Bible was discussed in church there--and many congregants believed it was.

Paglen: It's this small town with this open secret that nobody wants to talk about. It shows what's going on culturally. When a country starts doing things like torturing and disappearing people, it's not just a policy question, it's also a cultural question.

Roychoudhuri: When you started to put the pieces of the rendition program together, what did you see?

Paglen: Take Khaled el-Masri for example. His case was a blueprint for this program because it's the most complete account. He showed up in Germany after having disappeared for five months and told this incredible story. His interrogators told him not to tell anybody because they wouldn't believe him anyway. But when you excavate his story, there is a trail of evidence to corroborate it.

He says he was kidnapped in Macedonia on a certain day. It turns out that a plane-spotter took a picture of a known CIA airplane in Majorca [Spain] the day before el-Masri was kidnapped. German journalists went to the airport of Skopje [Macedonia] with this picture and verified the plane was there on that date. The plane had also filed a flight plan from Macedonia to Kabul. El-Masri said he was taken to Kabul. In Kabul, he said he was taken on a 10-minute drive to a prison. He drew a map of what he thought the prison floor plan was. We got on Google Earth, looked at Kabul and drew a ring around how far you could go in about 10 minutes. Then we compared the buildings in that ring to the map that el-Masri had drawn. We found a building that looks exactly like it. So we drove out there. There is indeed a giant facility with Americans there. He could not have made this up.

Roychoudhuri: You actually went to one of the places el-Masri believes he was held--the Salt Pit in Afghanistan.

Paglen: There have been at least three or four black sites in and around Kabul, Afghanistan. The one we definitely knew the location of was the Salt Pit. We found a driver who would take us out there. When you drive out to the Salt Pit, you have these wide plains; it's very isolated. We were driving up and there was a traffic jam which was a goat herder with a bunch of goats on the road. As we're waiting, he turns around and he's wearing a hat that says KBR--Kellogg Brown and Root (a subsidiary of Halliburton). As we drove farther, we saw a huge complex with a big wall around it. There are signs in English saying this is an Afghan military facility, no entrance. There's then a checkpoint. We were stopped. We told the guards we were turning around and going back to Kabul. We asked what goes on there and the guard said he didn't know exactly. Then we asked if there were Americans there. And he said, "Oh yes, there's lots of Americans here." And we saw some Americans sitting on a Humvee.

Roychoudhuri: Did you get a sense of the scope of the rendition program through your travels in Afghanistan?

Thompson: When Trevor and I went to Afghanistan we realized that this wasn't about a handful of CIA secret prisons. The U.S. military has erected some 20 detention centers throughout Afghanistan --which all operate in near total secrecy. These are facilities that the U.N., the Afghan government, journalists, and human rights groups can't get into. Extraordinary rendition is one facet of a much broader story of secrecy and imprisonment that spans the globe.

In Kabul and Gardez, we interviewed many people--in human rights organizations, NGOs, local journalists, and former detainees. We realized that the kinds of distinctions that we were making between CIA and military black sites, CIA and military torture made absolutely no sense to people. It's more like the U.S. is treating this whole country as if it were a giant black site.

Paglen: This rendition and torture is one flavor of a larger thing going on: the U.S. taking people all over the place, imprisoning and torturing them without charge.

Thompson: From interviewing a lot of detainees and Dr. Rafiullah Bidar, regional director of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, it was clear that the Americans had grabbed hundreds and hundreds of people. They're being held without charges, in some 20 different facilities.

Roychoudhuri: Who are these people?

Paglen: When A.C. interviewed people who had been held at the military air base Bagram, prisoners told him that there were Iraqis, Yemenis, an international cast of characters at this DOD prison. So what the hell are they doing there? These are not high-profile renditions like el-Masri or Khaled Sheikh Mohammed. So who are these guys? How did they get there? Is this part of the rendition program, or has the practice of transferring prisoners to these different places around the world become a standard practice?

Roychoudhuri: In the book, you make clear that the rendition program has been around for years. What has changed?

Paglen: The program was established over multiple administrations, Democrat and Republican. For example, Aero Contractors was set up under the Carter administration. The counter-terrorist unit in the CIA was set up under the Reagan administration, but the rendition program was set up under Clinton. It's an accumulation of the capacity of this infrastructure. After 9/11, the CIA went about setting up this entire infrastructure. Materially, they started getting airplanes and secret prisons together. They also started putting together a corporate structure, meaning shell companies. All of this was already in place, but not solidified. All the controls seemed to be taken off of it. They're not planning each operation so meticulously, they're not getting presidential authorization for each operation.

We're hearing about it now because it grew so big, clearly expanding beyond what the intention of the program was at first. There is no question that some of these guys they're picking up did nothing and are the wrong people. One of the differences between the pre- and post-9/11 is that the CIA becomes squarely in charge of the program. Before, the CIA was working with the FBI.

Thompson: The pre-9/11 program was geared more towards adjudicating people domestically who were suspected of crimes against American citizens. That was obviously not quite as controversial as running this huge program that's snatching people and taking them to secret dungeons around the world.

Roychoudhuri: Clearly, other countries have to be at least partially aware of the program in order for the U.S. program to operate. Did you get a sense of the level of collaboration?

Paglen: We know that immediately after 9/11 the CIA set up a program to collaborate with 80 foreign countries to varying degrees. The CIA also started funding other intelligence services in order to use them as proxies. We also know that some of these collaborations were kept off the record; supposedly there is no paper trail.

Roychoudhuri: Has that off-the-record quality caused glitches in the program?

Paglen: What happened in October of 2001 is that one of these airplanes landed in Pakistan. The Pakistani intelligence service (ISI) picked up a guy named Jamil Qasim Saeed Mohammed. The plane landed on the tarmac; they had this guy in chains. That guy was handed over to the Americans and put into this Gulfstream. They were going to fly him out of there, but the air traffic controllers require a landing fee and they refused to pay. The ISI then went to the airport officials and told them to waive the landing fee, so the plane took off. But it created a stir, and drew attention to the aircraft. A Pakistani journalist heard about this and published it, including the tail number of the plane in the newspaper. American journalists then got their hands on this tail number, and this is one of the very early keys that began to unlock parts of this story.

Roychoudhuri: As journalists have begun tracking plane numbers, the CIA has attempted to reshuffle. They change the number on the plane, or they change the phone line of the shell companies. How much do you think public scrutiny can achieve?

Thompson: A ton. If people want the CIA to be reined in and if they feel we shouldn't go around the world summarily detaining and torturing people, they can truly pressure their government to make that happen. They did it in the '70s through Frank Church, the Idaho senator, and the Church Committee. They severely curbed the transgressions and the misdeeds of the CIA. The thing is, by and large Americans don't care about this. Europeans, who play a much smaller role in this, are absolutely outraged about it; their governments are outraged about it. The day Americans decide that they don't think torture is something we should do, than maybe we'll see some pressure to change these things.

Roychoudhuri: You quote 9/11 Commission member Jamie Gorelick in the book: "In criminal justice, you either prosecute suspects or let them go. But if you've treated them in ways that won't allow you to prosecute them, you're in this no man's land. What do you do with those people?" Based on the fact that it's so difficult to bring these people back out of this extralegal system, do you have any sense of where the rendition program is going?

Paglen: This is the crucial question that we are facing right now. Bush transferred a handful of guys to Guantanamo and acknowledged they were kept in these secret prisons. Congress has to come up with a framework to prosecute these guys. It's common knowledge that most of the guys at Guantanamo are nobodies. Many were turned in by bounty hunters. But the guys that Bush transferred to Guantanamo Bay are guys that everybody agrees are bad guys. The sticking point is that they have tortured them for years and the evidence against them is totally tainted by rendition and torture. These are guys that people definitely want to see put on trial. By moving them to Guantanamo Bay, Bush is basically challenging Congress and saying, "If you want to put Khaled Sheikh Mohammed on trial, you're going to have to retroactively authorize torture, rendition, and the black site program."

If Congress does authorize the president's version of the bill, they're not only retroactively authorizing torture, they're creating a legal framework for the future. That would create a system where disappearing and torturing people would become a part of the law.

Onnesha Roychoudhuri is a Brooklyn-based freelance writer. A former assistant editor of AlterNet, she has written for AlterNet, MotherJones.com, Women's e-News, and PopMatters.

Embarrassed Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee were forced to hold a second vote to pass Bush's bill after losing the first one to Democrats and a couple of defecting Republicans. They then mustered absent members to eke out a 20-19 majority to send the bill to the House floor.

On another national security issue before the November 7 congressional elections, the House Judiciary and Intelligence committees, on separate votes, narrowly approved legislation to impose new rules on Bush's warrantless domestic spying programme.

Both measures are certain to be hotly debated in the House and Senate before members go home in October to campaign for re-election.

The committee vote on the interrogations measure reflected divisions among House Republicans over Bush's bill, as moderates and a few conservatives questioned whether Bush's plan would backfire on US personnel in future wars and whether it met US judicial standards.

Bush wants the authority from Congress to allow a programme of CIA interrogations and detentions that critics have said amount to torture. The White House denies the programme involves torture. The US Supreme Court in June struck down Bush's original plan.

House Majority Leader John Boehner of Ohio shrugged off the Republican defections and called Democrats' opposition "just one more in a long line of troubling actions that weaken our ability to wage and win the Global War on Terror."

The White House is trying to reach a compromise with a group of rebelling Senate Republicans over the bill, Without a deal, his measure faces almost certain defeat in the Senate as Democrats and a number of Republicans say it would allow abusive interrogations and unfair trials.

The US general who oversees the Guantanamo prison for terrorism suspects urged Congress on Wednesday to offer clear guidance on what interrogation techniques are prohibited under international accords barring inhumane treatment of war prisoners.

General Bantz Craddock, outgoing chief of the Miami-based US Southern Command, said military interrogators needed a precise definition of what constituted "outrages on personal dignity" - prohibited under Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions.

Republican backers of Bush's warrantless domestic spying programme said the new legislation would update surveillance laws, bolster oversight and spell out when and how a president can order such surveillance without a court order.

Opponents, mostly Democrats, said the legislation would expand presidential powers and threaten civil liberties.

The bill now goes to the full House. The Senate is struggling to agree on a surveillance measure of its own.

Critics charge the surveillance programme, begun shortly after the September 11 attacks, violates the law requiring warrants for eavesdropping on suspects inside the United States.

A federal judge recently ruled the programme illegal. The case is expected to end up in the Supreme Court after Bush appealed, arguing he had the inherent power to do it.

Bush has been accused of surpassing his authority in a number of areas since the September 11 attacks, including the indefinite detention and harsh treatment of foreign terrorism suspects and overly aggressive counterterrorism measures domestically.

"A provision dealing with classified evidence makes sure that no sensitive intelligence will have to be shared with terrorists or their lawyers," White House national security adviser Stephen Hadley said.

"The bar is very high," he said.

The White House hammered out a compromise with the Senate Republicans who balked at President George Bush's proposals to allow harsh questioning of suspects by the CIA and to limit detainee rights at trial.

The deal is expected to pave the way for a Senate vote, but afterward, differences would still need to be worked out with the House of Representatives.

Hadley said there remained a disagreement between the two chambers on the details of the provision on access to evidence. He said they would be ironed out in the conference deliberations.

But how does it really work? The current debate over torture, specifically President Bush's efforts to gain congressional approval for certain interrogation techniques, is a confusing morass of stonewalling, half-truths and moral posturing wrapped up in politics and legalisms. The whole truth remains concealed behind a veil of government secrecy. Nonetheless, it is possible to piece together a picture of the how torture is actually used by the United States. And it doesn't look much like the episodes on "24."

U.S. officials do not use the word torture to describe their own methods. Instead, American intelligence officials speak of "aggressive interrogation measures," sometimes euphemistically known as "torture lite." According to human-rights activists who have consulted with Senate staffers involved in the negotiations, Bush administration officials are trying to redefine the Geneva Conventions, which bans "cruel practices," to allow seven different procedures: 1) induced hypothermia, 2) long periods of forced standing, 3) sleep deprivation, 4) the "attention grab" (forcefully seizing the suspect's shirt), 5) the "attention slap," 6) the "belly slap" and 7) sound and light manipulation. As NEWSWEEK reported this week in its story The Politics of Terror, a harsh technique called "waterboarding," which induces the sensation of drowning, would be specifically banned.

These procedures, apparently including waterboarding, have been used on several so-called High Value Targets-alleged top Al Qaeda operatives in captivity. Without getting into specifics, President Bush has stated that his administration's interrogation and detention program has been necessary to foil plots and save lives.

But is that true? In recent interviews with NEWSWEEK reporters, U.S. intelligence officers say they have little-if any-evidence that useful intelligence has been obtained using techniques generally understood to be torture. It is clear, for instance, that Al Qaeda operations chief Khalid Shaikh Mohammed (KSM) was subjected to harsh interrogation techniques, including waterboarding. His interrogators even threatened, à la Jack Bauer, to go after his family. (KSM reportedly shrugged off the threat to his family-he would meet them in heaven, he said.) KSM did reveal some names and plots. But they haven't panned out as all that threatening: one such plot was a plan by an Al Qaeda operative to cut down the Brooklyn Bridge-with a blow torch. Intelligence officials could never be sure if KSM was holding back on more serious threats, or just didn't know of any.

There has long been a split between the FBI, which favors (and has long experience with) slower, more benign interview techniques, like establishing long-term, personal relationships between interrogator and subject. Responsibility for KSM was given to the CIA, which had much less experience with interrogations before 9/11, but was more gung-ho. In the months and years after 9/11, the intelligence community feared a second wave of attacks and wanted quick results.

Ron Suskind, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist whose book, "The One Percent Doctrine," stands as the most thorough examination of CIA interrogations thus far, paints a very skeptical picture in his depiction of the interrogations of top Al Qaeda officials. Meanwhile, some experts on torture say the debate over acceptable techniques helped create the 2004 scandal at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. In a manner of speaking, Abu Ghraib had nothing to do with the intelligence community's rules on interrogation. The Abu Ghraib abuses were the work of poorly trained, overwhelmed prison guards. Nonetheless, they were operating in an environment in which it was generally understood that "the gloves were off" when it came to interrogating prisoners. That is the problem with even a limited set of exceptions to an outright ban on torture or "torture lite." If even some exceptions are made, they can be seen as a license by guards and interrogators. Who is to say that interrogators will stop at a "belly slap" or an "attention grab" if they are permitted to lay hands on the prisoners in a darkened cell? Administration officials have said that "less than five" Al Qaeda officials were subjected to those authorized "aggressive" techniques. But Special Forces soldiers and CIA operatives were roughing up so many prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan that at least a score died.

The Bush administration has tried another approach to end-run critics: farming out torture. For years, American intelligence handed over prisoners to be interrogated by other security services less squeamish about squeezing information out of suspects. These so-called renditions picked up after 9/11. The very first high-ranking Al Qaeda operative captured-Abu Faraj al-Libbi-was first interrogated by the FBI. But when the FBI wanted to use its normal, go-slow methods, the prisoner was turned over to the CIA-who promptly turned him over to the Egyptians. (NEWSWEEK has reported that as al-Libbi was led to a plane routed for Egypt, a CIA operative whispered in his ear that he planned to "f--- your mother".) Under the no-doubt rough care of the Egyptians, al-Libbi talked of plots and agents. The information was used to make the case for war against Iraq. As recounted in "Hubris," a new book by NEWSWEEK's Michael Isikoff and David Corn, there was only one problem: al-Libbi later recanted, saying that he had lied to stop the torture.

With Mark Hosenball, Michael Hirsh, Michael Isikoff and Steve Tuttle

"We're not going to speculate with you today about recommendations," Baker announced at the session, hosted by the U.S. Institute of Peace.

Can the war in Iraq be won?

"We're not going to make any assessments today about what we think the status of the situation is in Iraq," said Hamilton.

Could they at least explain their definitions of success and failure in Iraq?

"We're not going to get into that today," Baker replied.

After more such probing, Hamilton became categorical. "We've made no judgment of any kind at this point about any aspect of policy with regard to Iraq."

A few minutes later, one of the organizers called out: "We have time for one or two more questions."

"But no time for any answers," one of the reporters muttered.

"This is pitiful," contributed one of the cameramen, as reporters' smiles escalated into audible chuckles.

Baker was bothered by the questioning. "Malicious," he whispered to Hamilton, unaware that it could be heard on the audio feed.

As a general rule, it's a bad idea to call a news conference if you have nothing to say. It's worse if you announce that answers are urgently needed but then decline to provide any.

"The next three months are critical," Hamilton warned at the start. "Before the end of this year, this [Iraqi] government needs to show progress in securing Baghdad, pursuing national reconciliation and delivering basic services."

But no matter how urgent the situation in Iraq, the solutions will have to wait at least until Nov. 8 -- and possibly much later -- because of a more urgent consideration: domestic politics. We're "going to report after the midterm election," Baker announced.

Bill Jones of Executive Intelligence Review asked the obvious question. "The situation in Iraq seems to be degenerating from day to day" and may not be a "salvageable situation" by November, he said. "Shouldn't the urgency be propelled by developments in Iraq rather than the calendar here?"

Baker didn't think so. "We think it's more important, frankly, to make sure whatever we bring forward is taken, to the extent that we can take it, out of domestic politics," he said.

Baker, a troubleshooter for President Bush, said "We have said from Day One that we were going to report after the midterm election." In fact, Baker said on Day One -- the commission's launch on March 15, 2006 -- that "we have not set a time frame" and that "we may come forward with some interim reports."

The only thing the two would say yesterday is that they had met with lots of people, including several Iraqis on a 3 1/2 -day visit to Iraq recently.

"How much were you able to leave the Green Zone while you were in Baghdad?" a woman in the audience asked.

Baker admitted that only one of the 10 members, former senator Charles Robb (D-Va.), left the capital's heavily fortified enclave to see the violence-torn land. "It was recommended to us that it would probably be something that we ought not to do but they were willing for us to do it if we insisted," reasoned Baker. "We didn't insist because we didn't want somebody to write a story that we were cowboyin' down there in Iraq."

And besides, cowboy Hamilton added, "we had a very brief period in Iraq."

Hamilton, who also served as vice chairman of the Sept. 11 commission, spent considerable time praising Baker and the other members with some of the same phrases -- "sense of purpose," "able people" -- members of that commission used on each other.

But the reporters were determined to extract a nugget of useful information from the pair, who stood in twin gray suits.

"I understand you don't want to get into the recommendations," said the Wall Street Journal's Yochi Dreazen, but "do you think Iraq is still winnable in any substantive sense, or is the issue for your panel now minimizing the scale of U.S. loss and the suffering the U.S. may have going forward?"

"Secretary Baker and I simply are not able at this point even to give you a good idea of where the study group exists with regard to recommendations," Hamilton reiterated.

"Can you at least explain certain definitions?" pleaded Spencer Ackerman of the New Republic. For example, he asked, "what does a responsible exit mean?"

"That's the very question that Mr. Hamilton just said we're not going to get into," Baker repeated.

It didn't qualify as a recommendation, but the two did have some advice for the Iraqi government. "The people of Iraq have the right to expect immediate action," Hamilton said.

Providing, of course, they don't expect it from the Iraq Study Group.

All: I haven't written very much from Iraq . There's really not much to write about. More exactly, there's not much I can write about because practically everything I do, read or hear is classified military information or is depressing to the point that I'd rather just forget about it, never mind write about it. The gaps in between all of that are filled with the pure tedium of daily life in an armed camp. So it's a bit of a struggle to think of anything to put into a letter that's worth reading. Worse, this place just consumes you. I work 18-20-hour days, ev ery day. The quest to draw a clear picture of what the insurgents are up to never ends. Problems and frictions crop up faster than solutions. Every challenge demands a response. It's like this every day. Before I know it, I can't see straight, because it's 0400 and I've been at work for twenty hours straight, somehow missing dinner again in the process. And once again I haven't written to anyone. It starts all over again four hours later. It's not really like Ground Hog Day, it's more like a level from Dante's Inferno.

Rather than attempting to sum up the last seven months, I figured I'd just hit the record setting highlights of 2006 in Iraq . These are among the events and experiences I'll remember best.

Worst Case of Déjà Vu - I thought I was familiar with the feeling of déjà vu until I arrived back here in Fallujah in February. The moment I stepped off of the helicopter, just as dawn broke, and saw the camp just as I ha d left it ten months before - that was déjà vu. Kind of unnerving. It was as if I had never left. Same work area, same busted desk, same chair, same computer, same room, same creaky rack, same . . . everything. Same everything for the next year. It was like entering a parallel universe. Home wasn't 10,000 miles away, it was a different lifetime.

Most Surreal Moment - Watching Marines arrive at my detention facility and unload a truck load of flex-cuffed midgets. 26 to be exact. I had put the word out earlier in the day to the Marines in Fallujah that we were looking for Bad Guy X, who was described as a midget. Little did I know that Fallujah was home to a small community of midgets, who banded together for support since they were considered as social outcasts. The Marines were anxious to get back to the midget colony to bring in the rest of the midget suspects, but I called off the search, figuring Bad Guy X was long gone on his short legs after seeing his companions rounded up by the giant infidels.

Most Profound Man in Iraq - an unidentified farmer in a fairly remote area who, after being asked by Reconnaissance Marines (searching for Syrians) if he had seen any foreign fighters in the area replied "Yes, you."...

Worst City in al-Anbar Province - Ramadi, hands down. The provincial capital of 400,000 people. Killed over 1,000 insurgents in there since we arrived in February. Every day is a nasty gun battle. They blast us with giant bombs in the road, snipers, mortars and small arms. We blast them with tanks, attack helicopters, artillery, our snipers (much better than theirs), and every weapon that an infantryman can carry. Every day. Incredibly, I rarely see Ramadi in the news. We have as many attacks out here in the west as Baghdad . Yet, Baghdad has 7 million people, we have just 1.2 million. Per capita, al-Anbar province is the most viole nt place in Iraq by several orders of magnitude. I suppose it was no accident that the Marines were assigned this area in 2003.

Bravest Guy in al-Anbar Province - Any Explosive Ordnance Disposal Technician (EOD Tech). How'd you like a job that required you to defuse bombs in a hole in the middle of the road that very likely are booby-trapped or connected by wire to a bad guy who's just waiting for you to get close to the bomb before he clicks the detonator? Every day. Sanitation workers in New York City get paid more than these guys. Talk about courage and commitment.

Second Bravest Guy in al-Anbar Province - It's a 20,000 way tie among all the Marines and Soldiers who venture out on the highways and through the towns of al-Anbar every day, not knowing if it will be their last - and for a couple of them, it will be.

Best Piece of U.S. Gear - new, bullet-proof flak jackets. O.K., they weigh 40 lbs and aren't exactly comfortable in 120 degree heat, but they've saved countless lives out here.

Best Piece of Bad Guy Gear - Armor Piercing ammunition that goes right through the new flak jackets and the Marines inside them.

Worst E-Mail Message - "The Walking Blood Bank is Activated. We need blood type A+ stat." I always head down to the surgical unit as soon as I get these messages, but I never give blood - there's always about 80 Marines in line, night or day.

Biggest Surprise - Iraqi Police. All local guys. I never figured that we'd get a police force established in the cities in al-Anbar. I estimated that insurgents would kill the first few, scaring off the rest. Well, insurgents did kill the first few, but the cops kept on coming. The insurgents continue to target the police, killing them in their homes and on the streets, but the cops won't give up. Absolutely incredible tenacity. The insurgents know that the police are fa r better at finding them than we are.
- and they are finding them. Now, if we could just get them out of the habit of beating prisoners to a pulp . . .

Greatest Vindication - Stocking up on outrageous quantities of Diet Coke from the chow hall in spite of the derision from my men on such hoarding, then having a 122mm rocket blast apart the giant shipping container that held all of the soda for the chow hall. Yep, you can't buy experience.

Biggest Mystery - How some people can gain weight out here. I'm down to 165 lbs. Who has time to eat?

Second Biggest Mystery - if there's no atheists in foxholes, then why aren't there more people at Mass every Sunday?

Favorite Iraqi TV Show - Oprah. I have no idea. They all have satellite TV.

Coolest Insurgent Act - Stealing almost $7 million from the main bank in Ramadi in broad daylight, then, upon exiting, waving to the Marines in the combat outpost right next to t he bank, who had no clue of what was going on. The Marines waved back. Too cool.

Most Memorable Scene - In the middle of the night, on a dusty airfield, watching the better part of a battalion of Marines packed up and ready to go home after six months in al-Anbar, the relief etched in their young faces even in the moonlight. Then watching these same Marines exchange glances with a similar number of grunts loaded down with gear file past - their replacements. Nothing was said.. Nothing needed to be said.

Highest Unit Re-enlistment Rate - Any outfit that has been in Iraq recently. All the danger, all the hardship, all the time away from home, all the horror, all the frustrations with the fight here - all are outweighed by the desire for young men to be part of a 'Band of Brothers' who will die for one another. They found what they were looking for when they enlisted out of high school. Man for man, they now have more combat e xperience than any Marines in the history of our Corps.

Most Surprising Thing I Don't Miss - Beer. Perhaps being half-stunned by lack of sleep makes up for it.

Worst Smell - Porta-johns in 120 degree heat - and that's 120 degrees outside of the porta-john.

Highest Temperature - I don't know exactly, but it was in the porta-johns. Needed to re-hydrate after each trip to the loo.

Biggest Hassle - High-ranking visitors. More disruptive to work than a rocket attack. VIPs demand briefs and "battlefield" tours (we take them to quiet sections of Fallujah, which is plenty scary for them). Our briefs and commentary seem to have no affect on their preconceived notions of what's going on in Iraq . Their trips allow them to say that they've been to Fallujah, which gives them an unfortunate degree of credibility in perpetuating their fantasies about the insurgency here.

Biggest Outrage - Practically anything said by talking heads on TV about the war in Iraq , not that I get to watch much TV. Their thoughts are consistently both grossly simplistic and politically slanted. Biggest offender - Bill O'Reilly - what a buffoon!

Best Intel Work - Finding Jill Carroll's kidnappers - all of them. I was mighty proud of my guys that day. I figured we'd all get the Christian Science Monitor for free after this, but none have showed up yet. Talk about ingratitude.

Saddest Moment - Having the battalion commander from 1st Battalion, 1st Marines hand me the dog tags of one of my Marines who had just been killed while on a mission with his unit. Hit by a 60mm mortar. Cpl Bachar was a great Marine. I felt crushed for a long time afterward. His picture now hangs at the entrance to the Intelligence Section. We'll carry it home with us when we leave in February.

Biggest Ass-Chewing - 10 July immediately following a visit by the Iraqi Deputy Pr ime Minister, Dr. Zobai. The Deputy Prime Minister brought along an American security contractor (read mercenary), who told my Commanding General that he was there to act as a mediator between us and the Bad Guys. I immediately told him what I thought of him and his asinine ideas in terms
that made clear my disgust and which, unfortunately, are unrepeatable here. I thought my boss was going to have a heart attack. Fortunately, the translator couldn't figure out the best Arabic words to convey my meaning for the Deputy Prime Minister. Later, the boss had no difficulty in conveying his meaning to me in English regarding my Irish temper, even though he agreed with me. At least the guy from the State Department thought it was hilarious. We never saw the mercenary again.

Best Chuck Norris Moment - 13 May. Bad Guys arrived at the government center in the small town of Kubaysah to kidnap the town mayor, since they have a problem with any form of government that does not include regular beheadings and women wearing burqahs. There were seven of them. As they brought the mayor out to put him in a pick-up truck to take him off to be beheaded (on video, as usual), one of the bad Guys put down his machinegun so that he could tie the mayor's hands. The mayor took the opportunity to pick up the machinegun and drill five of the Bad Guys. The other two ran away. One of the dead Bad Guys was on our top twenty wanted list. Like they say, you can't fight City Hall.

Worst Sound - That crack-boom off in the distance that means an IED or mine just went off. You just wonder who got it, hoping that it was a near miss rather than a direct hit. Hear it every day.

Second Worst Sound - Our artillery firing without warning. The howitzers are pretty close to where I work. Believe me, outgoing sounds a lot like incoming when our guns are firing right over our heads. They'd ab out knock the fillings out of your teeth.

Only Thing Better in Iraq Than in the U.S. - Sunsets. Spectacular. It's from all the dust in the air.

Proudest Moment - It's a tie every day, watching my Marines produce phenomenal intelligence products that go pretty far in teasing apart Bad Guy operations in al-Anbar. Every night Marines and Soldiers are kicking in doors and grabbing Bad Guys based on intelligence developed by my guys. We
rarely lose a Marine during these raids, they are so well-informed of the objective. A bunch of kids right out of high school shouldn't be able to work so well, but they do.

Happiest Moment - Well, it wasn't in Iraq . There are no truly happy moments here. It was back in California when I was able to hold my family again while home on leave during July.

Most Common Thought - Home. Always thinking of home, of [name redacted] and the kids. Wondering how everyone else is getting along. Regretting that I don't write more. Yep, always thinking of home.

I hope you all are doing well. If you want to do something for me, kiss a cop, flush a toilet, and drink a beer. I'll try to write again before too long - I promise.

Semper Fi,

[Name redacted]

The report, from an even-handed senior UN official, is in sharp contrast with the hopes of George Bush and Tony Blair, when in 2003 they promised to bring democracy and respect for human rights to the people of Iraq. The brutal tortures committed in the prisons of the regime overthrown in 2003 are being emulated and surpassed in the detention centres of the present US- and British-backed Iraqi government. "Detainees' bodies show signs of beating using electric cables, wounds in different parts of their bodies including in the head and genitals, broken bones of legs and hands, electric and cigarette burns," the human rights office of the UN Assistance Mission in Iraq says in a new report.

The horrors of the torture chamber that led to Saddam Hussein's Iraq being labelled "The Republic of Fear", after the book of that title by Kanan Makiya, have again become commonplace. The bodies in Baghdad's morgue " often bear signs of severe torture including acid-induced injuries and burns caused by chemical substances, missing skin, broken bones (back, hands and legs), missing eyes and wounds caused by power drills or nails", the UN report said. Those not killed by these abuses are shot in the head.

Human rights groups say torture is practised in prisons run by the US as well as those run by theInterior and Defence ministries and the numerous Sunni and Shia militias.

The pervasive use of torture is only one aspect of the utter breakdown of government across Iraq outside the three Kurdish provinces in the north. In July and August alone, 6,599 civilians were killed, the UN says.

One US Army major was quoted as saying that Baghdad is now a Hobbesian world where everybody is at war with everybody else and the only protection is self-protection.

Iraq is in a state of primal anarchy. Paradoxically, the final collapse of security this summer is masked from the outside world because the country is too dangerous for journalists to report what is happening. Some 134 journalists, mostly Iraqi, have been killed since the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003.

The continuing rise in the number of civilians killed violently in Iraq underlines the failure of the new Iraqi government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki installed in May after intense US and British pressure. The new government shows no signs of being more effective than the old. "It is just a government of the Green Zone," said an Iraqi official, referring to the fortified zone in central Baghdad housing the Iraqi government as well as the US and British embassies.

In an attempt to regain control of the capital and reduce sectarian violence, government and US troops launched "Operation Together Forward" in mid-July, but it seems to have had only marginal impact for a couple of weeks. The number of civilians killed in July was 3,590 and fell to 3,009 in August but was on the rise again at the end of the month.

The bi-monthly UN report on Iraq is almost the only neutral and objective survey of conditions in the country. The real number of civilians killed in Iraq is probably much higher because, outside Baghdad, deaths are not recorded. The Health Ministry claims, for instance, that in July nobody died violently in al-Anbar province in western Iraq, traditionally the most violent region, but this probably means the violence was so intense that casualty figures could not be collected from the hospitals.

Nobody in Iraq is safe. Buses and cars are stopped at checkpoints and Sunni or Shia are killed after a glance at their identity cards. Many people now carry two sets of identity papers, one Shia and one Sunni. Car number plates showing that it was registered in a Sunni province may be enough to get the driver shot in a Shia neighbourhood. Sectarian civil war is pervasive in Baghdad and central Iraq. Religious processions are frequently attacked. On 19 and 20 August, a Shia religious pilgrimage came under sustained attack that left 20 dead and 300 wounded.

The Iraqi state and much of society have been criminalised. Gangs of gunmen are often described on state television as "wearing police uniforms" . One senior Iraqi minister laughed as he told The Independent: " Of course they wear police uniforms. They are real policemen."

On 31 July, for instance, armed men in police uniforms driving 15 police vehicles kidnapped 26 people in an area of Baghdad known as Arasat that used to be home to several of the capital's better restaurants. Gunmen dressed in police uniforms had also kidnapped the head of Iraq's Olympic Committee, Ammar Jabbar al-Saadi, and 12 others, in the centre of Baghdad. Ransom demands were made. The US military suspected that Baghdad police's serious crime squad may have been responsible and stormed its headquarters to search vainly for the kidnap victims in its basement.

It has long been a matter of amusement and disgust in Iraq that government ministers travel abroad to give press conferences claiming that the insurgency is on its last legs. One former minister said: "I know of ministers who have never been to their ministries but get their officials to bring documents to the Green Zone where they sign them."

Beyond the Green Zone, Iraq has descended into murderous anarchy. For several days this month, the main road between Baghdad and Basra was closed because two families were fighting over ownership of an oilfield.

Government ministries are either Shia or Sunni. In Baghdad this month, a television crew filming the morgue had to cower behind a wall because the Shia guards were fighting a gun battle with the Sunni guards of the Electricity Ministry near by.

Then... and now

1998 "The Commission on Human Rights noted...massive and extremely grave violations of human rights and of international humanitarian law by the Government of Iraq... hundreds of executions, some of which may have been extrajudicial executions... Torture and ill-treatment continued to be widespread."

2006 "The situation as far as torture is concerned is now completely out of hand... many people say that it is worse than in the times of Saddam Hussein. You find bodies with very heavy and serious torture marks. "

1998 In July a group of six people, including one woman, were sentenced to death by hanging on charges of organised prostitution, involvement in the white slave trade and smuggling alcohol to Saudi Arabia.

2006 On 7 September, the Iraqi authorities announced the execution by hanging at Abu Ghraib prison of 27 prisoners, including one woman, convicted of terror and criminal charges. It is the first mass execution since Saddam Hussein's rule.

Jerome Taylor