[Mb-civic] Bob Herbert

[Mike Blaxill]

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/110305B.shtml

Secrets and Shame 
    By Bob Herbert 
    The New York Times 

    Thursday 03 November 2005 

    Ultimately the whole truth will come out and
historians will have their say, and Americans
will look in the mirror and be ashamed. 

    Abraham Lincoln spoke of the "better angels"
of our nature. George W. Bush will have none of
that. He's set his sights much, much lower. 

    The latest story from the Dante-esque depths
of this administration was front-page news in The
Washington Post yesterday. The reporter, Dana
Priest, gave us the best glimpse yet of the
extent of the secret network of prisons in which
the CIA has been hiding and interrogating terror
suspects. The network includes a facility at a
Soviet-era compound in Eastern Europe. 

    "The hidden global internment network is a
central element in the CIA's unconventional war
on terrorism," wrote Ms. Priest. "It depends on
the cooperation of foreign intelligence services,
and on keeping even basic information about the
system secret from the public, foreign officials
and nearly all members of Congress charged with
overseeing the CIA's covert actions." 

    The individuals held in these prisons have
been deprived of all rights. They don't even have
the basic minimum safeguards of prisoners of war.
If they are being tortured or otherwise abused,
there is no way for the outside world to know
about it. If some mistake has been made and they
are, in fact, innocent of wrongdoing - too bad. 

    As Ms. Priest wrote, "Virtually nothing is
known about who is kept in the facilities, what
interrogation methods are employed with them, or
how decisions are made about whether they should
be detained or for how long." 

    This is the border along which democracy
bleeds into tyranny. 

    Some of the prisoners being held by the CIA
are no doubt murderous individuals who, given the
opportunity, would do tremendous harm. There are
others, however, whose links to terrorist
activities are dubious at best, and perhaps
nonexistent. 

    The CIA's original plan was to hide and
interrogate maybe two or three dozen top leaders
of Al Qaeda who were directly involved in the
Sept. 11 attacks or were believed to pose an
imminent threat. It turned out that many more
people were corralled by the CIA for one reason
or another. Their terror ties and intelligence
value were less certain. But they were thrown
into the secret prisons, nevertheless. 

    A number of current and former officials told
The Washington Post that "the original standard
for consigning suspects to the invisible universe
was lowered or ignored." 

    The secret CIA prisons are just one link in
the long chain of abominations that the Bush
administration has unrolled in its so-called
fight against terrorism. Rendition, the
outsourcing of torture to places like Egypt,
Jordan and Syria, is another. And then there are
the thousands upon thousands of detainees being
held at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, in Afghanistan
and in Iraq. There is little, if any, legal
oversight of these detainees, or effective
monitoring of the conditions in which they are
being held. 

    Terrible instances of torture and other forms
of abuse of detainees have come to light. The
Pentagon has listed the deaths of at least 27
prisoners in American custody as confirmed or
suspected criminal homicides. 

    None of this has given the administration
pause. It continues to go out of its way to block
a legislative effort by Senator John McCain, the
Arizona Republican, to ban the "cruel, inhuman or
degrading treatment" of any prisoner in US
custody. 

    I had a conversation yesterday with Michael
Posner, executive director of Human Rights First,
about the secret CIA prisons. "We're a nation
founded on laws and rules that say you treat
people humanely," he said, "and among the
safeguards is that people in detention should be
formally recognized; they should have access, at
a minimum, to the Red Cross; and somebody should
be accountable for their treatment. 

    "What we've done is essentially to throw away
the rule book and say that there are some people
who are beyond the law, beyond scrutiny, and that
the people doing the detentions and
interrogations are totally unaccountable. It's a
secret process that almost inevitably leads to
abuse." 

    Worse stories are still to come - stories of
murder, torture and abuse. We'll watch them
unfold the way people watch the aftermath of
terrible accidents. And then we'll ask, "How
could this