At the same time, Gen. Michael V. Hayden had taken over as CIA director and suggested in a speech to the agency staff that he was going to review the viability of the CIA's secret program.

That review all but collapsed later in June when the Supreme Court ruled, in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld , that detainees must be put under the protections of the Geneva Conventions, in effect declaring the CIA's program illegal.

Even though comments from the justices at oral argument had suggested that they might rule against the administration's detainee policies, the White House counsel had made no contingency plans for a loss and was stunned by the decision.

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"The court's decision was much more sweeping than we expected," a senior White House official said yesterday.

Most senior Justice Department lawyers believed the ruling would force the government to close the CIA's "black sites." Other lawyers disagreed.

In a series of emergency meetings with top government lawyers after the Hamdan ruling, the CIA's legal adviser, John Rizzo, told his colleagues that the program was becoming increasingly difficult to maintain anyway. Since its disclosure in press reports, several countries had asked the CIA to close prisons on their soil and other countries had refused requests to host new ones. Other lawyers noted that it had simply damaged the ability of U.S. intelligence agencies to work with important allies on almost anything.

The lawyers ended up agreeing that the CIA could not hold the suspects indefinitely. "There had to be an end game," said one official close to the deliberations.

As a compromise, they agreed that in principle the Hamdan decision didn't mean that the sites couldn't exist; it just meant that the CIA could no longer handle suspects outside the boundaries of the Geneva Conventions.

Hamdan "forced our hand," said White House counselor Dan Bartlett, the only administration official who agreed to speak on the record. "We knew there was going to have to be some acknowledgment that they were in our hands." Also, he said, the intelligence value of interrogations had diminished to the point where the administration thought "we could bring them to justice."

The president speaks
After nearly two dozen meetings of senior policymakers on the detainee issue, Bush convened his principal advisers at the end of August to make a final decision. Several had moved far away from the impassioned defenses of secret prisons that they had mounted a year earlier.

Rice had had a series of conversations with Bush on the detainee issue, but at that National Security Council meeting she made her final pitch for a change in policy. In front of her colleagues, according to several who attended, she said that it was important for the United States to bring the issue to closure, both on foreign policy grounds and moral grounds. She noted that the secret sites were having a corrosive effect on the nation's ability to win cooperation on a range of intelligence issues. Rice urged the president to resolve the issue rather than hand it off to his successor.

The president agreed.

"This is a paradigm shift for the administration," said one senior official who was involved.

The core of Rice's argument appeared in the penultimate paragraph of the president's speech.

"America is a nation of law," Bush said, adding that he had heard the concerns of other world leaders about the administration's detention policies. "I'll continue to work with the international community to construct a common foundation to defend our nations and protect our freedoms."

Other advisers, including Cheney, who had essentially lost out on a program he had fought to preserve, were rewarded in the speech, namely with the president's assurance, if only in theory, that the black sites program could be used again.

"It's true the program could continue, but it will never occur in the same manner that it operated before," said one influential official.

Staff writers Charles Lane, Michael Abramowitz and Dan Eggen and staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.

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