WASHINGTON — Secret prisons in Eastern Europe. Illegal detentions. Suspects snatched off the streets and shipped without extradition to other countries for harsh interrogation. Government directives cloaked in secrecy.

A flashback to Stalin’s Soviet Union? Hardly.

To hear some European critics of the George W. Bush administration tell it, this all describes current practices of the world’s most powerful and open democracy — the United States.

Dismay over Washington’s covert intelligence practices and the seizures of suspected terrorists has swept Europe. It has challenged the administration’s credibility and tarnished the nation’s status as the premier defender of human rights.

“You don’t want serious people to believe that the American government does things that decent people don’t do,” said Michael Mandelbaum, professor of American foreign policy at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. “I don’t know if it’s true or not, but obviously the suspicions are out there.”

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had to contend with the torture and prison-camp issue at every stop on a five-day visit to Europe. The trip was intended to rebuild US relations with its allies that were frayed by the Iraq war.

The European leaders with whom Rice met seemed to accept her reassurances that the US did not practise torture and would punish those who broke the rules.

Some European commentators and politicians are suggesting that the US has established its own “gulag” system in its zeal to fight global terrorism.

Administration supporters scoffed at such comparisons. They note that hundreds of thousands of prisoners were held — and thousands died — in the forced labour camps run by Soviet leader Josef Stalin.

The administration has neither confirmed nor denied that the CIA maintains such prisons in former Soviet-bloc nations. Even so, Rice told reporters in Belgium that the administration “is quite clear and quite determined to carry out the president’s policy ... that the United States does not engage in torture, doesn’t condone it, doesn’t expect its employees to engage in it.”

Reports about secret CIA prisons and the forced flying of suspected terrorists to third countries for interrogation follows reports of prisoner mistreatment at Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib prison and at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Yet the treatment of detainees remains hotly debated in Congress. It soon may come to a head on legislation by Senator John McCain, a Republican, that would ban the “cruel, inhuman and degrading” treatment of foreigners in US custody and require US troops to follow interrogation procedures in the Army Field Manual.

The administration has opposed McCain’s proposal, which the Senate passed overwhelmingly. White House spokesman Scott McClellan said the administration was “working very hard” with McCain and other congressional leaders in search of a “good solution”.

Vice President Dick Cheney has lobbied Congress to exempt the CIA from any such torture ban. It’s a stance that clearly did not simplify Rice’s job of convincing Europeans that the professed zero tolerance for torture by the US was for real.

McCain has said there should be no exemptions to the torture ban because “if you do that, then you carve out exceptions — and then you end up with gulags”. — Associated Press