The Terrorists Have Won

From the New York Times:

WASHINGTON, March 5 - The Bush administration's secret program to transfer suspected terrorists to foreign countries for interrogation has been carried out by the Central Intelligence Agency under broad authority that has allowed it to act without case-by-case approval from the White House or the State or Justice Departments, according to current and former government officials.

The unusually expansive authority for the C.I.A. to operate independently was provided by the White House under a still-classified directive signed by President Bush within days of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the officials said. ...

In providing a detailed description of the program, a senior United States official said that it had been aimed only at those suspected of knowing about terrorist operations, and emphasized that the C.I.A. had gone to great lengths to ensure that they were detained under humane conditions and not tortured. ...

The official declined to be named but agreed to discuss the program to rebut the assertions that the United States used the program to secretly send people to other countries for the purpose of torture. The transfers were portrayed as an alternative to what American officials have said is the costly, manpower-intensive process of housing them in the United States or in American-run facilities in other countries.

In recent weeks, several former detainees have described being subjected to coercive interrogation techniques and brutal treatment during months spent in detention under the program in Egypt and other countries. The official would not discuss specific cases, but did not dispute that there had been instances in which prisoners were mistreated. The official said none had died.

Though some probably wished they could have.

Was he actually trying to make the case that, at a time when fighting terrorism is our number one objective, that we are capturing suspects and then giving over control of them to Egypt, Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, just to save money? "Costly, manpower-intensive process of housing them" in American-run facilities? You've got to be kidding. We're not willing to spend money to keep suspected terrorists in jail? Are we having our nuclear weapons built cheaply in China now, too?

Or are the "costs" they're worried about measured in the difficulty of maintaining secret torture chambers on American soil?

All the real torture expertise is over there, anyway.

Each of those countries has been identified by the State Department as habitually using torture in its prisons. But the official said that guidelines enforced within the C.I.A. require that no transfer take place before the receiving country provides assurances that the prisoner will be treated humanely, and that United States personnel are assigned to monitor compliance.

"We get assurances, we check on those assurances, and we double-check on these assurances to make sure that people are being handled properly in respect to human rights," the official said. The official said that compliance had been "very high" but added, "Nothing is 100 percent unless we're sitting there staring at them 24 hours a day."

Right. Though, I bet if they were in a prison in Sweden, we might be able to hit 100% and still sleep? Doesn't sending them to places where the prisons habitually torture create extra problems? And, when we have convicted someone here of passing messages from a prisoner to his terrorist buddies on the outside, doesn't sending these guys back to the countries they came from seem like a risk?

If we didn't want them tortured, why send them there? It's not like we're really good buddies with Syria, right? And once we send them there, they're not really under our direct control, are they?

In Congressional testimony last month, the director of central intelligence, Porter J. Goss, acknowledged that the United States had only a limited capacity to enforce promises that detainees would be treated humanely. "We have a responsibility of trying to ensure that they are properly treated, and we try and do the best we can to guarantee that," Mr. Goss said of the prisoners that the United States had transferred to the custody of other countries. "But of course once they're out of our control, there's only so much we can do. But we do have an accountability program for those situations."

Oh, well then. Accountability program. How's that working? How'd it do with the guys who were doing our interrogations in Guantanamo and Iraq? You know, the ones the FBI observers thought went over the line? Are we talking written reprimands in their personnel files? Unpaid suspensions? Cut in pay grade? (I'm still foggy on "accountability" in this administration.)

Just how do we hold these foreign torturers accountable? It it works so well, maybe we could get them to stop torturing their own people too. We haven't ever gotten very far with that.

Mr. Goss, if "once they're out of our control, there's only so much we can do," then to "do the best we can" to "ensure that they are properly treated," we'd need to keep them under our control, not hand them over to known torturers. See how that works? No, I guess you don't. And neither, apparently, does your boss.

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The terrorists attacked us because they thought we were an immoral and inhuman power in the world. And we are proving them right.