WASHINGTON - Congress has eased the worries of CIA interrogators and senior administration officials by granting them immunity from U.S. criminal prosecutions for all but "grave' abuses of terrorism prisoners.
But legislation passed Friday may not leave them entirely in the clear.
International legal experts said the measure is meaningless overseas, where international courts theoretically could still prosecute alleged violations of anti-torture treaties.
The same experts concede such prosecutions are highly unlikely -- but not because there's no evidence of wrongdoing. Instead, they predict American economic, military and political power will deter any country from allowing the cases to proceed.
The House already had voted this week, 253-168, to endorse Bush's plan for military prisoners. The Senate passed a nearly identical bill Thursday by a 65-34 vote. Rather than reconcile the technical differences between the two bills, the House on Friday voted 250-170 to send the Senate version to the president to sign.
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President Bush asserts that al-Qaeda terrorists are a different kind of enemy, and that the Geneva Conventions ensuring the humane treatment of prisoners were too vague to define what interrogation methods could be used to extract information that might prevent another Sept. 11. He said in announcing the transfer of 14 top terrorism suspects from secret CIA prisons to Guantanamo Bay that the United States does not torture, but that "alternative' techniques gleaned information that disrupted attacks and saved lives.
Human rights groups here and abroad, however, are in an uproar, assailing tactics such as giving a prisoner a drowning sensation or shackling him to the floor naked for hours in a 50-degree room.
The firestorm seems sure to rage on, because the new legislation appears to allow Bush to authorize continued use of some coercive interrogation tactics, possibly including sleep deprivation or making a prisoner stand for hours.
Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which represents hundreds of prisoners, said his group is preparing to file new war crimes charges in November in Germany against more than a dozen senior U.S. officials, probably including attorneys who shaped the policy. Two years ago, the group filed similar charges against Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and 10 others -- charges that were dismissed after Rumsfeld hedged on whether he would attend a conference in Germany.
Legal experts say charges also could be filed in a recently created International Criminal Court in The Hague, Netherlands, which has jurisdiction over war crimes. European authorities are under pressure to respond to allegations that they breached human rights laws by cooperating with illegal CIA kidnappings and detentions of their own citizens.
Congress was pressed into action after the Supreme Court ruled June 29 that Bush overstepped his authority in setting up a special military court system for terrorism prisoners. The high court also suggested that the Geneva Conventions could apply.
Experts in international law said that the tactics would violate the Geneva Conventions, which override any nation's assertion of amnesty for war crimes.
"Legally, this isn't worth the paper it's written on,' said Avril McDonald, an international law expert with the T.M.C. Asser Institute in The Hague.
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The Associated Press contributed to this report.
