Editorial:
The CIA must not be allowed to detain terrorist suspects abroad in secret, where they are vulnerable to torture and other mistreatment.
Nov. 6, 2005, 11:21PM
AMERICAN VALUES
Copyright 2005 Houston Chronicle
PROVING a negative is difficult. It becomes daunting when — as with the allegations of secret CIA prisons abroad — the accusations sound more plausible than the denials.
Last week, the Washington Post reported that the CIA operates secret prisons in eight countries. The network, the Post reported, spread after 9/11 and includes complexes in Thailand, Afghanistan and two "democracies in Eastern Europe." More than 100 prisoners reportedly were funneled into secret detention camps.
A day after the Post report, the New York-based Human Rights Watch made similar allegations, saying 2003 flight logs showed a CIA-commissioned plane shuttling frequently among Afghanistan, Iraq, Romania and Poland at the same time the United States was known to be moving key al-Qaida suspects out of Afghanistan and Iraq.
Officials in Romania and Poland, which only recently shed communism and its culture of gulags, vigorously denied that such prisons exist on their soil. The CIA offers neither confirmation nor denial, but recent history makes the accusations believable.
The CIA already stands accused of participating in the inhumane treatment of prisoners in Afghanistan and Iraq and at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The agency has embraced a practice called rendition, in which it captures suspected terrorists around the world and turns them over to nations such as Syria, Egypt and Saudi Arabia known to practice torture — after receiving worthless assurances that the suspects will not be mistreated.
The Washington Post story drew in part on accounts by CIA personnel who reportedly had grown weary of the moral and practical compromises secret detention creates. The officials' concerns echo in a debate in the Senate, which is considering a $445 billion defense bill. One provision, which the Senate overwhelmingly passed, bans "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment" of any detainee of the United States. But Vice President Dick Cheney insists that Congress exempt the CIA from this ban.
Torture and mistreatment do not produce good intelligence. Even if they did, cruel treatment would remain against international treaties and American values. Yet the Bush administration remains impervious to the damage its position on torture does to the nation's stature abroad. There is no point in sending Undersecretary of State Karen Hughes to champion our values if the Muslim world knows our democracy makes room for torture and secret detention.
Administration officials asked the Post not to identify the Eastern European democracies for fear these allies might suffer reprisals. If it really wants to protect our allies — as well as our own soldiers — the Bush administration must be able to show democracy's transcendent rejection of the cruelties of tyranny.
Secret prison camps must close. Prisoners cannot be "disappeared" without access to lawyers. And no U.S. agency, on any country's soil, should be permitted to hold prisoners in secret where they would be vulnerable to torture or other mistreatment.
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