Newscasts and newspapers are full of stories about Rice making the rounds of Europe. See, e.g., this story in the Washington Post. She will talk to European leaders and spend considerable time trying to defend U.S. military and intelligence tactics from increasingly negative revelations. She continues to hoe the party line that the U.S. doesn't use or condone torture. But that is still coupled with statements that the U.S. will use "every lawful weapon" to fight those it condemns as terrorists. When the concept of "lawful" is as elusive as it proved in the 2002 Justice Department memos defending anything short of lethal blows as non-torture, these words provide little assurance that the U.S. is not overreaching.
Rice so far is declining to answer directly questions about the rendition of U.S. detainees to secret prisons scattered across Europe and especially not identifying in public those countries harboring such secret prisons. Id. Meanwhile, the Germans are amassing flight data that links airport activity with claims of CIA rendition flights. It doesn't sound comforting. Rice has apologized to Germany on behalf of the United States for its detention of German-Lebanese Al-Masri, who claims he was held secretly in an Afghan prison and treated horribly in connection with that detention. Rendered suspects are apparently grabbed by intelligence forces, stripped naked, rendered unconscious with powerful drugs, provided enemas to purge their intestines of possible information while enroute to their secret prison destination, and left in secret prisons for interrogation.
It is not clear that there is an acceptable defense for this Defense/Intelligence behavior. The first step towards a police state is enactment of legislative provisions that strip ordinary citizens or other potentially innocent people of due process rights in the face of a government claim that they have committed a grave act of treason towards the state. We should move to a genuine hearing to test the U.S. characterization of any detainee as an enemy combatant and quit using the shield of a purported "war" on terrorism to prevent the normal operation of due process protections. At the same time, Congress should finally stop its erosion of personal freedoms by refusing to extend the Patriot Act, except for the most innocuous provisions that merely permit better information sharing between appropriate agencies of the government.
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