Los Angeles Times
October 6, 2004
Despite a last-minute hesitation by the Bush administration, the House may still
take up provisions that would allow U.S. officials to ship terror suspects to
countries that permit torture. If this language, attached to the larger
intelligence reform bill, survives, it would shred the international treaty
against torture that the United States signed on to 20 years ago. Beyond the
diplomatic fallout, it would mock any claim to moral high ground offered up to
justify the war in Iraq.
The House measure allows what is legally called
"extraordinary rendition," a comfy abstraction that essentially means to torture
by proxy. The Senate's intelligence reform bill fortunately has no such
provision.
Torture by proxy seems already to have been applied to
Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen born in Syria. The computer technician was
arrested between international flights at John F. Kennedy Airport in 2002 on
suspicion of being a member of Al Qaeda. After 13 days of interrogation,
federal officials expelled h im to Syria. There, Arar said, he was held for 10
months in a "grave-sized cell" and beaten and tortured before Syrian officials
decided he was innocent and released him.
Arar, now back in Ottawa,
may not be the only terror suspect so treated. CIA agents are believed to be
holding as many as 100 so-called "ghost" detainees in Iraq. Their names and
locations and the conditions under which they are held are secret —
contrary to international law governing prisoners of war. Some off-the-books
prisoners may have been packed off to Yemen or Pakistan for the bare-knuckles
treatment.
The American Bar Assn. is incensed by the House's
apparent willingness to bless torture by proxy. Its pressure seems to have
pushed Alberto Gonzales, the president's chief lawyer, into publicly distancing
the administration from the measure.
Still, a spokesman for House
Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) has said the Justice Department "really
wants and supports" these provisions. Presumably tho se are the same Justice
Department officials who argue that as commander in chief, the president is
bound neither by international nor domestic laws barring torture.