Speaking in Panama Bush told foreign reporters that the United States does not support, condone, or actively engage in it. So then, he won’t veto the McCain amendment right?

The United States was sharply criticized for its handling of detainees after photographs of guards abusing prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq shocked the world.

U.S. forces have held hundreds of detainees at known facilities outside the United States since the September 11, 2001, attacks, such as Guantanamo Bay. But senior leaders of al Qaeda who have captured, such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, have been kept in secret detention facilities overseas.

Bush did not confirm or deny the existence of CIA secret prisons that The Washington Post disclosed last week, and would not address demands by the International Committee of the Red Cross to have access to the suspects reportedly held at them.

“We are finding terrorists and bringing them to justice,” Bush said at a news conference with Panamanian President Martin Torrijos. “We are gathering information about where the terrorists might be hiding. We are trying to disrupt their plots and plans,” he said.

“Anything we do to that end in this effort, any activity we conduct, is within the law,” Bush said. “We do not torture. And therefore we’re working with Congress to make sure that as we go forward, we make it possible, more possible to do our job.”

Meanwhile, after such staunch denunciation of the illegal practice of torture Vice President Dick “Let’s go to war on Bad Intel” Cheney is fighting to get an exemption for the CIA in the McCain amendment that would only force the U.S. government to follow the ban on torture written in the Army’s field manual.

The Senate voted 90-9 for the McCain amendment to prohibit the use of torture and abuse of prisoners in U.S. custody, adding it to a $440 billion defense spending bill despite a White House veto threat.

The House of Representatives did not include the detainee rules in its version of the bill, and House and Senate negotiators are working out differences for a final bill.

The White House position is that international treaty obligations already on the books govern the treatment of suspects and that the United States is observing those rules.

Yes, well the part they leave out is the careful maneuvering the Bush White House has used with the help of now Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez to get around such provisions by classifying detainees as enemy combatants and not prisoners of war, a classification so effective the Supreme Court even allowed it to hold up against U.S. citizens.