A week after President Bush revealed the existence of the CIA's secret prison system and announced that "there are now no terrorists in the CIA program," a new report says that terror suspects are still being held by the agency in secret locatons.

The Sunday Times of London reported that the British charity Reprieve, which provides legal support for death row prisoners, alleges that "dozens" of terror suspects have just "disappeared."

Reprieve believes many detainees are being held in a form of joint custody, where countries such as Afghanistan provide jail facilities and guards and the CIA supplies the interrogators. It says there are several hundred detainees still at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan, none of whom has been named by the Pentagon.

Among the"disappeared" is Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, who is said to have managed one of Osama Bin Laden's training camps in Afghanistan. He was captured in 2002, questioned by the CIA and transferred under America's programme of "extraordinary rendition" to a jail in Egypt. By 2003 he was back in CIA custody and was spotted by several prisoners at Bagram. Since then he has vanished. Aafia Siddiqui, 34, a Pakistani educated at the University of Houston, disappeared in Karachi in 2003. American officials said she was under interrogation but, according to Reprieve, her family knows nothing of her fate.

The Times also reports that prisoners are thought to have been held in eastern Europe, northern Africa and Thailand. Also last week, a Jordanian general said that "tens of prisoners" had arrived in unmarked jets in Amman, and were then taken to the headquarters of the Jordanian intelligence service for questioning.

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The Independent reports that there were eight secret prisons used by the United States: "Among the locations were Afghanistan, Qatar, Thailand, the Indian island base of Diego Garcia (leased by the US from Britain) as well as Poland and Romania." The Independent also questions whether all the secret camps have been shut down, and whether all the secret detainees are now at the US prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

First, has the CIA really shut down the "black sites"? Last December, the Human Rights Watch organisation published a list of 26 people it believed were in this system of camps; 13 of them were among those now being moved to Guantanamo. But the other 13 it says it cannot account for.

Then there is the case of Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, one of the first high-level suspects placed in CIA custody and reputedly the source of the claims – advanced by Colin Powell at the UN in 2003 in justification of the Iraq invasion – that Saddam Hussein had links with Al Qaeda. That suggestion was again debunked last Friday by a damning Senate Intelligence Committee report. Al-Libi's claim, understood to have been extracted while he was being tortured by Egyptian interrogators, almost certainly added to the doubts about the value of information gained in such circumstances.

In a piece for the Columbia Journalism Review, former Slate columnist Eric Ulmansky (currently a Gordon Grey fellow in the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University) looks at how the American media has covered the issue of the treatment of detainess, in particular the question of possible methods that could be called torture, and finds that "while the press has been reluctant to believe that Americans would engage in such brutality, it has, at the same time, been squeamish about exposing torture in the context of terrorism."

Mr. Ulmansky writes that there were several factors affecting the way the media covered allegations of torture: a reluctance by editors to believe such accuations could be true, concern that by printing such stories it would not be portraying the military in a fair light, and a lack of interest in torture by Congress.

Things changed after the Abu Ghraib photos were published; news outlets flooded the zone, to borrow a phrase, with a near endless number of investigative pieces exploring just how policy contributed to abuse. At the same time, the administration's strategy of denial was often aided by longstanding journalistic shortcomings; for example, the tendency to treat both sides of an issue equally, without regard to where the facts might lie.

There is a final factor that has shaped torture coverage, one that is hard to capture. In most big scandals, such as Watergate, the core question is whether the allegations of illegal behavior are true. Here, the ultimate issue isn't whether the allegations are true, but whether they're significant, whether they should really be considered a scandal.

Though the administration has decided not to defend publicly the need for "coercive" interrogations, others have. Their argument is that the policy of abusive interrogations is not only acceptable but necessary to protect the United States. At the same time, polls on torture are notoriously sensitive to phrasing. It's the mixed results themselves, though, that may be telling. Americans appear to be ambivalent about the occasional need for torture. And with ambivalence, perhaps, comes a preference for not wanting to know.

The Associated Press reported last Friday that US Senate leaders have decided to back legislation that would allow the prosecution of terror detainees via military tribunals, despite the objections of several leading Republican senators, and the dissent of the military's top lawyers.

Also sounding alarms on Bush's legislation were the Pentagon's top uniformed lawyers. Testifying before a House panel, the [US military's] judge advocates general said the plan could violate treaty obligations and make U.S. troops vulnerable.

"While we seek that balance" of fairness and security, "we also must remember the concept of reciprocity," said Brig. Gen. James Walker, staff judge advocate for the Marine Corps. "What we do and how we treat these individuals can, in the future, have a direct impact on our service men and women overseas."

Their objections echoed criticism military lawyers levied in July, when they publicly challenged earlier Bush administration proposals to limit the rights accused terrorists would have during trials. In the past, some military officials have expressed concerns that if the US adopts such standards, captured American troops might be treated the same way.

The military's judge advocates general testified the day after President Bush admitted and defended the existence of secret prisons, saying that 14 final Al Qaeda suspects had now been transferred to Guantanamo, and saying that the secret prisons had been shut down. He also defended the use prisoner interrogation procedures as "tough, and they were safe and lawful and necessary." US State Department legal adviser John Bellinger III also told reporters Thursday that if additional members of the Al Qaeda terror network were captured, "we reserve the right to have those people questioned by the CIA."

• Bush: Saddam was not responsible for 9/11 (Guardian)
• Half of British public think UK 'losing terror war' (BBC)
• Religious leaders urge Muslims to distance faith from terrorism (Boston Globe)
• Iran offers security help to Iraqi premier (Reuters)

Feedback appreciated. E-mail Tom Regan.