WASHINGTON, Oct 24: The US Justice Department authorized the CIA to transfer detainees out of Iraq for interrogation - a practice that contravenes the Geneva Conventions, the Washington Post reported on Sunday.

The permission, given in a secret memo, would further embarrass the Bush administration which was humiliated across the world over massive abuses of prisoners at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison earlier this year.

At the request of the CIA, the Justice Department drafted a confidential memo that authorizes the agency to transfer detainees out of Iraq for interrogation - a practice that international legal specialists say contravenes the Geneva Conventions.

The report said the CIA used the March draft memo as legal support for secretly transporting as many as a dozen detainees out of Iraq in the last six months. The agency has concealed the detainees from the International Red Cross and other authorities, the report said.

The draft opinion, written by the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel and dated March 19, 2004, refers to both Iraqi citizens and foreigners in Iraq, who the memo says are protected by the Geneva Conventions. It permits the CIA to take Iraqis out of the country to be interrogated for a "brief but not indefinite period". It also says the CIA can permanently remove persons deemed to be "illegal aliens" under "local immigration law."

Lawyers, interviewed by the Post, said the US memo contravenes one of the most basic rights of Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which protects civilians during wartime and occupation, including insurgents who were not part of Iraq's military.

The treaty prohibits the "individual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory ... regardless of their motive."

The 1949 treaty notes that a violation of this particular provision constitutes a "grave breach" of the accord, and thus a "war crime" under US federal law, according to a footnote in the Justice Department draft.

During the war in Afghanistan, the US administration ruled that Al Qaeda fighters were not considered "protected persons" under the convention.