THE Bush Administration’s battle to treat suspected terrorists the way it wants may go on as long as the “War on Terror”.

Yesterday it suffered a setback when a US federal judge ordered it to release the names of hundreds of detainees at Guantanamo Bay.

As Charles Bremner reports, a Council of Europe investigator also said yesterday that the US flew detainees to other countries where they would be tortured, and that European governments probably knew about it.

But in a separate move, the US Army changed its rules on the death penalty. They could, in theory, let detainees convicted by military commissions be executed at Guantanamo Bay.

These shifts are part of a many-sided struggle between the Administration, Congress, the judiciary and the press to establish the limits of presidential power in the “War on Terror”.

That battle has been going on since September 11, 2001, when President Bush declared the attacks to be a war, and a new kind of war at that.

His lawyers have claimed steadily that when Congress authorised the use of military force against the perpetrators, it gave him the authority to wage war as he saw fit.

But national attention has been stirred up to new heights this year, for four reasons.

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