If you haven't written or called John McCain to thank him for putting forward legislation, approved by 90 Senators, to provide that the United States will not engage in cruel and degrading treatment of prisoners in U.S. custody, you may want to do so. He has taken a courageous position, since Vice President Cheney and CIA Director Porter Goss have pushed Congress hard for an exception that would allow the CIA to engage in authorized torture. Hopefully both houses of Congress will pass this anti-torture legislation so that we can all rest easier that our country stands firm on the right side on this issue.
In the meantime, more information is slowly becoming available about the CIA's network of hidden prisons established after 9/11. The Washington Post's Dana Priest reported here that these "black sites" are "known to only a handful of officials in the United States." Officials connected with them have not provided information about the facilities, interrogation techniques or detention policies in any open Congressional hearings, but apparently some of these prisons are in Eastern European countries in violation of their legal requirements. "More than 100" detainees have been sent to these sites, where CIA interrogators are permitted to use "enhanced interrogation techniques" (like waterboarding) that include tactics prohibited under the U.N. Convention Against Torture and under current U.S. military law after the revelations of abuses at Abu Ghraib.
As Bob Herbert noted in his November 3, 2005 OpEd in the New York Times (at A27), holding prisoners without any rights and without "the basic minimum safeguards of prisoners of war" means that if they are tortured, no one in the outside world will know it. If they are innocent, they have no redress. Herbert quotes Michael Posner, executive director of Human Rights First, who notes that "What we've done is essentially to throw away the rule book and say that there are some people who are beyond the law, beyond scrutiny." As Herbert says, "This is the border along which democracy bleeds into tyranny."
Priest does indicate that there is considerable internal debate at the CIA about the black site detentions. That is a hopeful sign, given the widespread concern that torture violates our international agreements and is a heavy price to pay for information that is likely to be unreliable. NPR's All Things Considered also reported tonight that the EU had initiated an investigation of this matter.
Let's hope that the Congress will continue to probe these matters and force these practices to end. America should pull back from this quagmire of lifelong detentions of people without due process in prisons that are sequestered away from the ordinary world.
As you indicated, information obtained by torture tends to be unreliable. When I served as Intelligence Operation Officer of the 4th Armored Division in Germany, our professional interrogators told me that they try to develop a rapport with the detainee, and this normally takes a few days, but the information from that effort is almost always very good.
They indicated that torture is only used by pathetic amateurs in their area of expertise. For an insight into the world of the professional interrogator, read "Talking to Victor Charlie" by Tourison.
Posted by: Wolfgang P. May | November 05, 2005 at 04:19 PM