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WASHINGTON, Oct. 25 - A new legal opinion by the Bush administration has concluded for the first time that some non-Iraqi prisoners captured by American forces in Iraq are not entitled to the protections of the Geneva Conventions, administration officials said Monday.

The opinion, reached in recent months, establishes an important exception to public assertions by the Bush administration since March 2003 that the Geneva Conventions applied comprehensively to prisoners taken in the conflict in Iraq, the officials said. They said the opinion would essentially allow the military and the C.I.A. to treat at least a small number of non-Iraqi prisoners captured in Iraq in the same way as members of Al Qaeda and the Taliban captured in Afghanistan, Pakistan or elsewhere, for whom the United States has maintained that the Geneva Conventions do not apply.

The officials outlined the opinion on Monday in response to a report in The Washington Post over the weekend that the Central Intelligence Agency had secretly transferred a dozen non-Iraqi prisoners out of Iraq in the past 18 months, despite a provision in the conventions that bars civilians protected under the accords from being deported from occupied territories.

Since early 2002, the United States has moved hundreds of Qaeda and Taliban prisoners to the American base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. American officials have said prisoners captured in Iraq would not be moved to Guantánamo, but they declined to say Monday where any prisoners transferred out of Iraq were being sent.

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http://nytimes.com/2004/10/26/politics/26detain.html?hp&ex=1098763200&en=aec28bb5d2df0aa4&ei=5094&partner=homepage