Bill Clinton warns against wide torture approval

WASHINGTON, Sep 21 (Reuters) Former US President Bill Clinton joined a chorus of critics of Bush administration proposals for treating suspected terrorists, saying it would be unnecessary and wrong to give broad approval to torture.

In an interview with National Public Radio aired today, Clinton said any decision to use harsh treatment in interrogating suspects should be subject to court review.

''You don't need blanket advance approval for blanket torture,'' Clinton said.

Clinton was president during the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and attacks on US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya and on the USS Cole, all linked to al Qaeda. Critics accused him of doing too little to contain a growing threat of terrorism.

His successor, President George W Bush, wants Congress to narrowly define prisoner protections under the Geneva Conventions and allow a program of CIA interrogations and detentions that critics have said amount to torture.

The White House denies its interrogation program involves torture. The US Supreme Court in June struck down Bush's original plan.

Clinton warned against circumventing international standards on prisoner treatment, citing US abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, criticism of treatment at the Guantanamo Bay prison for suspected terrorists and a secret CIA prison system outside the United States.

''The president says he's just trying to get the rules clear about how far the CIA can go when they're when they whacking these people around in these secret prisons,'' Clinton said in NPR's ''Morning Edition'' interview, recorded yesterday.

''If you go around passing laws that legitimize a violation of the Geneva Convention and institutionalize what happened at Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo, we're going to be in real trouble,'' he said.

Clinton was the second former US president to criticize the Bush policy this week. On Monday, former President Jimmy Carter told Reuters the Bush administration was condoning the torture of suspects and had tried to redefine torture ''to make it convenient for them.'' Carter praised Republican Sens. John McCain of Arizona and John Warner of Virginia for trying to block the Bush policy on treatment of suspected terrorists. Bush's former secretary of state, Colin Powell, and William S Cohen, who was secretary of defence under Clinton, also backed the stand of McCain, Warner and Republican Sen.

Lindsey Graham of South Carolina.

''I think it's important to support Senators McCain and Warner in this,'' Cohen said today. ''We don't want to be seen as sanctioning torture. We're held to a higher standard and we don't want to put our troops at a higher risk.'' Clinton said that, even if there were circumstances where such treatment is necessary to prevent an imminent attack: ''You don't make laws based on that. You don't sit there and say in general torture's fine if you're a terrorist suspect. For one thing, we know we have erred in who was a real suspect.'' REUTERS PB PM2300