Bush admits running secret CIA prisons

US president George Bush finally acknowledged that the CIA ran secret prisons overseas and said tough interrogation forced terrorist leaders to reveal plots to attack the US and its allies, including Britain.

Bush said yesterday that 14 suspects – including the alleged mastermind of the September 11 2001 attacks and architects of the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole and the US Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 – had been turned over to the US Defence Department and moved to the US detention centre at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, for trial.

He said they included Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged September 11 mastermind, as well as Ramzi Bin al-Shibh, an alleged would-be 9/11 hijacker, and Abu Zubaydah, who was believed to have been a link between al-Qaida chief Osama bin Laden and many al-Qaida cells.

Mohammed was said by the US to have plotted to crash hijacked planes into Heathrow Airport after the 9/11 attacks.

Bush said the CIA programme “has helped us to take potential mass murderers off the streets before they were able to kill”.

Releasing information declassified just hours earlier, Bush said the capture of one terrorist months after the September 11 attacks had led to the capture of another and then another, and had revealed planning for attacks using planes, car bombs and anthrax.

Nearing the fifth anniversary of September 11, Bush pressed Congress to pass administration-drafted legislation quickly to authorise use of military commissions for trials of terror suspects. Legislation is needed because the Supreme Court said in June the administration’s plan for trying detainees in military tribunals broke US and international law.

“These are dangerous men with unparalleled knowledge about terrorist networks and their plans for new attacks,” Bush said, defending the CIA programme he authorised after September 11. “The security of our nation and the lives of our citizens depend on our ability to learn what these terrorists know.”

The president’s speech, his third in a recent series about his campaign against terror, gave him an opportunity to shore up his administration’s credentials on national security two months before congressional elections at a time when Americans are growing weary of the war in Iraq.

Democrats, hoping to make the elections a referendum on Bush’s policies in Iraq and the war on terror, urged anew that defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld be made to step down. The effort went nowhere in the Republican-controlled Senate.

With transfer of the 14 men to Guantanamo, the CIA was currently holding no detainees, Bush said. A senior administration official said the CIA had detained fewer than 100 suspected terrorists in the history of the secret detention programme.

Still, Bush said that “having a CIA programme for questioning terrorists will continue to be crucial to getting lifesaving information”.

The president refused to disclose the location or details of the detainees’ confinement, or the interrogation techniques that had been used.

“I cannot describe the specific methods used – I think you understand why,” Bush said in the East Room where families of some of those who died in the September 11 attacks gathered to hear his speech.

“If I did, it would help the terrorists learn how to resist questioning, and to keep information from us that we need to prevent new attacks on our country. But I can say the procedures were tough, and they were safe, and lawful and necessary.”

Bush insisted the detainees were not tortured.

“I want to be absolutely clear with our people and the world: The US does not torture,” Bush said. “It's against our laws, and it’s against our values. I have not authorised it, and I will not authorise it.”

Bush said the information from terrorists in CIA custody had played a role in the capture or questioning of nearly every senior al-Qaida member or associate detained by the US and its allies since the programme began.