The Bush administration's anti-terror strategy at home may lead to major miscarriages of justice, as happened in Britain in the 1970s and 1980s, suggests Denis Staunton, in Washington
While Washington obsessed this week about lewd e-mails former Republican congressman Mark Foley sent to teenage boys, President George Bush was travelling the country trying to refocus attention on his party's strongest suit - the fight against terrorism.
In a succession of speeches in support of Republican candidates in next month's mid-term elections, the president hailed new measures he said would help the US to defeat its Islamist enemies.
Chief among these is the Military Commissions Act of 2006, passed by Congress last week with the support of almost all Republicans and some Democrats, which Mr Bush claims will give the CIA "the tools they need" to defeat terrorism.
In fact, the new law not only undermines the US' constitutional tradition but is likely to fuel anti-American feeling throughout the world and impede the struggle against terrorism.
New legislation for dealing with detainees suspected of terrorism became necessary after the supreme court ruled in Hamdan v Rumsfeld this summer that the Bush administration's system of military tribunals for inmates at Guantánamo Bay was unconstitutional. The court found the tribunals lacked congressional authority and were in breach of the "laws of war" as outlined in the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the Geneva Conventions. In particular, the tribunals did not offer adequate protections to defendants, who could be denied access to evidence and convicted on the basis of evidence obtained through coercion but could not appeal their conviction through the court system.
Much of the debate about the new legislation focused on Mr Bush's initial demand to be allowed to reinterpret the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of prisoners. A handful of Republican senators including John McCain led a protest against the president's proposal, insisting that torture should be banned and that the Geneva Conventions should not be reinterpreted.
The senators' rebellion proved largely operatic, however, as all the rebels supported a bill that gives the president almost everything he wanted.
Under the new law, Mr Bush can determine that anyone who "purposefully and materially" supports hostilities against the US is an enemy combatant, who can be held indefinitely and interrogated.
Although torture and some other forms of harsh treatment are banned, the president can decide which lesser forms of harsh treatment are permissible and the administration has refused to rule out the use of techniques such as "waterboarding" which simulates drowning.
Detainees are stripped of habeas corpus rights so they cannot appeal against their imprisonment through federal courts but the administration is under no obligation to bring them to trial.
If they are tried, detainees can see only an edited version of classified evidence used against them and can, in some cases, be convicted on the basis of hearsay and coerced evidence.
The administration argues that, if they are not US citizens or legal aliens, foreign enemy combatants are not entitled to the protection of the US constitution.
It points out that aliens detained during the second World War were not allowed to challenge their imprisonment in US courts and maintains that determining who is an enemy combatant should be a military rather than a judicial decision.
The new law is certain to face challenges in the courts and some Republican legislators admit that some of its provisions are likely to be struck down by the courts. The damage to the United States' reputation by last week's decision will not be so easily undone, however, as Senator Hillary Clinton pointed out when she opposed the new law on the Senate floor.
"Have we fallen so low as to debate how much torture we are willing to stomach? By allowing this administration to further stretch the definition of what is and is not torture, we lower our moral standards to those whom we despise, undermine the values of our flag wherever it flies, put our troops in danger, and jeopardise our moral strength in a conflict that cannot be won simply with military might," she said.
The invasion of Iraq and Washington's continued support for autocratic regimes in the Middle East have already rendered American rhetoric about spreading freedom and democratic values implausible to many in the Muslim world. The new law, which will affect a detainee population that is almost exclusively Muslim, can only reinforce such suspicions of US intentions.
The Republican-controlled Congress rushed to pass this flawed bill in time to use it for political advantage in the election campaign. In doing so, it reneged on its constitutional obligation to act as a check on executive power, handing the president - and his successors - unprecedented authority.
Mr Bush has said that his primary aim in promoting the new legislation is to ensure that the CIA's detainee programme - which has seen almost 100 people held and interrogated in secret prisons throughout the world - can continue.
The stated purpose of the programme is intelligence gathering and the administration points to the British experience in fighting IRA terrorism as evidence that harsh methods can be used without eroding democracy.
Last week, however, Britain's lord chancellor Charles Falconer warned the US against following the example of Britain in the 1970s and 1980s, pointing out that loosening rules of evidence had led to miscarriages of justice such as the case of the Guildford Four.
"Keep your justice system as pure as you can. This is advice to a friend from the experience we have had," Lord Falconer said.
The United States is currently in no mood to listen to such friendly advice or to the words of Vladimir Bukovsky, a human rights activist who spent almost 12 years in Soviet prison camps and psychiatric hospitals.
"If vice-president Cheney is right, that some 'cruel, inhumane, or degrading' treatment of captives is a necessary tool for winning the war on terrorism, then the war is lost already," he said.