copyright 2009, The Washington Post From 2003 to 2006, the Bush administration quietly tried to relax the draft language of a treaty meant to bar and punish 'enforced disappearances' so that those overseeing the CIA's secret prison system would not be criminally prosecuted under its provisions, according to former officials and hundreds of pages of documents recently declassified by the State Department. The aim of the global treaty, long supported by the United States, was to end official kidnappings, detentions and killings like those that plagued Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s, and that allegedly still occur in Russia, China, Iran, Colombia, Sri Lanka and elsewhere. But the documents suggest that initial U.S. support for the negotiations collided head-on with the then-undisclosed goal of seizing suspected terrorists anywhere in the world for questioning by CIA interrogators or indefinite detention by the U.S. military at foreign sites. Instead of embracing a far-reaching ban on arrests, detentions and abductions of people without disclosing their fate or whereabouts or ensuring 'the protection of the law,' the United States pressed in 2004for a more limited prohibition on intentionally placing detainees outside legal protections for 'a prolonged period of time.' At the time, the CIA was secretly holding about a dozen prisoners. Foreign governments criticized the U.S.-preferred wording, calling it vague and saying that proving intent would be hard and should not be necessary. In the end, the Bush administration declined to endorse the treaty's broadly worded ban, which at least 81 countries have now signed, including all members of the European Union and many nations with checkered human rights records, such as Algeria, Argentina, Cuba and Guatemala. A White House official said the Obama administration is reviewing the previous U.S. stance on the treaty as part of a wider look at international human rights accords that Washington has not signed. The official did not say when a decision might be made. The administration has already reversed its predecessor's decision to shun the U.N. Human Rights Council, which is monitoring the treaty's implementation. But it has also said it will retain the ability to capture and transfer suspects to third countries, a practice known as rendition, while stressing that it will not do so if detainees are at risk of torture. The documents detailing U.S. proposals to loosen some of the treaty's key language were released last week in response to a Freedom of Information Act request by Amnesty International, but many passages were redacted, and the remaining portions make no direct reference to specific CIA or Defense Department objections. A senior Bush administration policymaker confirmed in an interview last week, however, that the existence of the CIA prisons and the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where the Defense Department has held hundreds of suspected terrorists without initially disclosing their names, was 'a complicating factor' in U.S. deliberations on it. 'Our negotiators were certainly aware that there was this program where people were being held, and were not in touch with people, and they had to be careful to ensure that there was room' for that program to continue, the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the deliberations. He added that the treaty's proposed definition of 'enforced disappearances' was only one of several problems Washington had with the draft. 'As with a number of previous human rights treaties, the language was just so broad that ... we were not going to be able to sign,' he said. The treaty requires member countries to enact domestic criminal penalties for state-orchestrated disappearances and to compensate victims, but it has not taken legal effect because it has not been ratified by at least 20 nations, the minimum required. That leaves U.N. investigations of such cases in the hands of a five-member group chaired by a South African, which last year sent 1,203 new allegations of enforced disappearances to officials in the 28 countries said to be involved. A total of 42,393 alleged such disappearances in 79 countries remain unresolved by the group, according to its most recent annual report. Staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report. 