Secretary Rice's
Rendition
EDITORIAL, NYTimes on
the Web, December 7, 2005
It was a sad enough measure of how
badly the Bush administration has damaged its moral standing that the secretary
of state had to deny that the president condones torture before she could visit
some of the most reliable American allies in Europe. It was even worse
that she had a hard time sounding credible when she did it.
Of course, it would have helped if Condoleezza Rice was actually in a position
to convince the world that the United States has not, does not and will not
torture prisoners. But there's just too much evidence that this has
happened at the hands of American interrogators or their proxies in other
countries. Vice President Dick Cheney is still lobbying to legalize
torture at the C.I.A.'s secret prisons, and to block a law that would reimpose
on military prisons the decades-old standard of decent treatment that Mr. Bush
scrapped after 9/11.
Pesky facts keep getting in the way of Ms. Rice's message. Yesterday, the
new German chancellor, Angela Merkel, said that Ms. Rice had acknowledged
privately that the United States should not have abducted a German citizen,
Khaled el-Masri, who says he was sent to Afghanistan and mistreated for five
months before the Americans realized that they had the wrong man and let him go.
Mr. Masri tried to appear at a press conference in Washington yesterday to
discuss a lawsuit filed in Virginia on his behalf by the American Civil
Liberties Union, a suit alleging wrongful imprisonment and torture -- but the
United States government has refused to allow him into the country.
At issue is the practice of extraordinary rendition. When a government
captures someone really dangerous, like a terrorist leader, who cannot be
charged under that government's own laws, it sends him to another country where
authorities are willing to charge the suspect or at least can get away with
locking him up indefinitely without charges.
It's been going on for decades, infrequently and selectively, but the United
States is reported to have stepped it up since 9/11 and violated international
law by sending suspects to places where it knows they will be tortured.
Recently, European governments expressed outrage at reports that some detainees
were held at secret C.I.A. prisons in Europe.
Ms. Rice, like other American officials, will not comment on these reports.
But before leaving Washington on Monday, she read a statement implying that if
there were any secret prisons out there, the host countries knew about them.
She rather bluntly warned that European countries who want American intelligence
had better not betray any secrets.
Certainly, some of Europe's shock at the news of the C.I.A. camps is political
theater aimed at the widely anti-American European public. But that
doesn't make it any less disturbing that the United States government seems to
have lost its ability to distinguish between acts that may occur sub rosa in
some exceptional, critical situations and the basic rules of proper
international behavior.
Ms. Rice said Monday that rendition had been used to lock up some really
dangerous bad guys, like Carlos the Jackal and Ramzi Yousef, who masterminded
the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. But both men were charged in courts,
put on trial, convicted and sentenced. That's what most American think
when they hear talk about "bringing the terrorists to justice" -- not predawn
abductions, blindfolded prisoners on plane rides and years of torture in distant
lands without any public reckoning.
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