In her Los Angeles Times opinion column, Rosa Brooks calls attention to an aspect of Bush's executive order on interrogation policy that, as she puts it, was
"barely noted by the media. . . ."Last week's executive order breaks new ground by outlining the category of people who can be detained secretly and indefinitely by the CIA -- in a way that's broad enough to include a hefty chunk of the global population. Under its terms, a non-U.S. citizen may be secretly detained and interrogated by the CIA -- with no access to counsel and no independent monitoring -- as long as the CIA director believes the person 'to be a member or part of or supporting Al Qaeda, the Taliban or associated organizations; and likely to be in possession of information that could assist in detecting, mitigating or preventing terrorist attacks
in locating the senior leadership of Al Qaeda, the Taliban or associated forces.'
"Got that? The president of the United States just issued a public pronouncement declaring, as a matter of U.S. policy, that a single man has the authority to detain any person anyplace in the world and subject him or her to secret interrogation techniques that aren't torture but that nonetheless can't be revealed, as long as that person is thought to be a 'supporter' of an organization 'associated' in some unspecified way with the Taliban or Al Qaeda, and as long he thinks that person might know something that could 'assist' us.
"But 'supporter' isn't defined, nor is 'associated organization.' That leaves the definition broad enough to permit the secret detention of, say, a man who sympathizes ideologically with the Taliban and might have overheard something useful in a neighborhood cafe, or of a 10-year-old girl whose older brother once trained with Al Qaeda."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/linkset/2005/04/11/LI2005041100879.html