Secret Prisons: As American As Apple Pie

Another update from the Washington Post on the CIA's secret torture prisons-

Washington Post: European Probe Finds Signs Of CIA-Run Secret Prisons

A European investigator concluded Wednesday that there are "serious indications" that the CIA operated secret prisons for senior al-Qaeda figures in Poland and Romania as part of a clandestine "spider's web" to catch, transfer and hold terrorism suspects around the world.

Dick Marty, a Swiss lawyer working on behalf of the Council of Europe, the continent's official human rights organization, said at least seven other European nations colluded with the CIA to capture and secretly detain terrorism suspects, including several who were ultimately cleared of any wrongdoing...

That last point is one of the big problems with this- besides the legal and moral issues, of course- when the administration chooses to fight a war that is so vaguely defined, we often fail to differentiate from the bad guys... and those that just look like them or were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Haditha is further proof of this. And sure, 'mistakes' like that happen in every war, but very rarely have they have been done so systematically as part of a larger theory of lawlessness and power expansion. That is what makes much of this unique.

On a related note, I read this excellent editorial on Guantanamo in The Nation-

"We don't want to be the world's jailer," insists Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Really? The Bush Administration seems to be waking up to the realization that Guantánamo Bay shames the United States before the world. The President and the Secretary now portray themselves as hapless custodians caught between Al Qaeda operatives and a slowpoke Supreme Court. "I would like to close the camp and put the prisoners on trial," the President declared May 10. It's as if Bush, Rice and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had never promulgated, approved or defended Guantánamo's law-free zone over the past four years.

The clock seems to be running down on Guantánamo. Last year Amnesty International secretary general Irene Khan was widely derided for describing Gitmo as the gulag of our times, but now impatience emanates from the world's capitals and even from the confines of the prison itself. In London, Lord Goldsmith--attorney general for Bush's staunchest ally and no stranger to harsh antiterrorism legislation--adopts Khan's analysis, calling Gitmo a global symbol of injustice: "The existence of Guantánamo Bay remains unacceptable." In Geneva the UN Commission Against Torture calls on the United States to close Guantánamo and any other prisons whose secrecy and lawlessness facilitate waterboarding, short-shackling or other brutalities that place our nation in violation of the Convention Against Torture. (CIA nominee Michael Hayden refused to condemn waterboarding at his recent confirmation hearing.) And in Guantánamo itself recently, a wave of suicide attempts was followed by a skirmish between guards and prisoners who had improvised weapons from lighting fixtures and electric fans.

While the White House party line on Guantánamo shifts, the lies that justify it go on...

And they won't end until the Supreme Courts stops them or until 2009, whichever comes first.

As I noted on Wednesday, Canada's recent terror success disproves the need for all of this.