Further, the Americans have a major interrogation and intelligence operation at the detention facility in Parwan, north of Kabul, and any agreement would have to outline a gradual transition of that capability so that the Afghans, as the Americans do now, could use the intelligence gained to mount raids quickly before suspects moved on.
The findings of this review, the latest in a series of military inquiries conducted in the past year, come as the top American military commander in Iraq has ordered the first major changes to interrogation procedures there in nearly a year, narrowing the set of authorized techniques and adding new safeguards to prevent abuse of Iraqi prisoners, officials said.
The ruling could have a major impact on future interrogations of terrorism suspects outside the United States.
Despite the political furor over reading terrorism suspects their Miranda rights, it is not clear that doing so has had a major impact on recent interrogations.
The Innocence Project, many other civil liberties groups and growing numbers of police departments and prosecutors' offices, argue that interrogations in major criminal cases should be recorded.
The punitive nature of the savaging of Soufan's book is evident in the agency's demand that he remove the personal pronouns "I" and "me" in an attempt to delete Soufan's heroic and entirely humane interrogations of major Al Qaeda figures.
Interrogations in major cases must theoretically be videotaped, and new "exclusionary rules" mandate that evidence obtained under torture be thrown out.
Even with the release of the memorandum, several major legal opinions on interrogation remain secret.
That theory and Mr. Deskovic's confession, extracted after hours of interrogation, played major roles in his conviction.
The ruling not only represented a victory for the government's efforts to prosecute three of the four defendants on trial, but could also have a major impact on the interrogation of terrorism suspects in the future.
