"The Army has adopted more reforms in response to the prisoner abuse scandal and the continuing challenge of holding and interrogating thousands of detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan.

That still leaves the most serious and systematic violations of human rights standards by the Bush administration unaddressed. These have occurred -- and are still occurring -- in the secret global detention network maintained by the Central Intelligence Agency. In clandestine prisons in Afghanistan and elsewhere, and in detention facilities maintained by authoritarian allies such as Egypt, the CIA is holding dozens of detainees without any legal process, outside review, family notification or monitoring by the Red Cross and other human rights groups. In effect, these prisoners have "disappeared," like the domestic opponents of dictatorships that the State Department annually critiques in its human rights report.

Despite this shocking record, Congress has abdicated its responsibility to oversee the agency and prevent it from violating fundamental American standards of decency. The Republican chairmen of the Senate and House intelligence committees, Sen. Pat Roberts (Kan.) and Rep. Peter Hoekstra (Mich.), have been resisting Democratic requests for an investigation of the CIA's handling of its secret detainees. Such an investigation need not be a witch hunt or compromise the handling of senior al Qaeda prisoners. On the contrary, it should form the basis for belated action by Congress to set legal standards for the detention of all foreign prisoners by the United States in keeping with international treaties and human rights laws. In the absence of such standards, the Bush administration has allowed abuses that have tarnished the image of the United States around the world and impeded its ability to fight Islamic extremism. The time to correct the CIA's excesses is long overdue. (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A8746-2005Mar4.html)"