[Mb-civic] Torture reports tarnish US image - Mark Brzezinksi - Boston Globe Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

Torture reports tarnish US image

By Mark Brzezinksi  |  November 22, 2005 | The Boston Globe

REPORTS THAT the CIA has run secret prisons in Eastern Europe to 
interrogate terrorist suspects have produced an outcry in the 
international community. The European Commission announced, according to 
The Financial Times, that it would investigate whether Poland and 
Romania have allowed the Central Intelligence Agency to run a secret 
detention and interrogation center on their soil. Europe's leading human 
rights organization, the Council of Europe, said it would open an 
investigation into the reports. The UN Human Rights Committee and its 
special rapporteur on torture said they have already been pressing the 
US government to disclose the existence of any secret detention centers. 
The concern of the international community is clear: The United States 
has for years promoted respect for due process and human rights in 
Eastern Europe, yet more recently the United States may have been taking 
shortcuts in precisely those areas in the name of security.

Officials in Poland and Romania, as well as in Latvia, Lithuania, and 
Estonia, have issued strong denials. The Czech interior minister said 
his country had rejected US requests to take prisoners being held at the 
US base in Guantanamo. It's illegal for the US government to hold 
prisoners in isolation in secret prisons in the United States.

But the CIA's internment practices also would be considered illegal 
under the laws of all the new democracies of Eastern Europe. In every 
East European democracy, detainees have rights to a lawyer and to mount 
a defense against allegations of wrongdoing. Indeed, the State 
Department publishes an annual Human Rights Report to inhibit in foreign 
lands just the kind of prisoner abuse being alleged. Under the EU 
treaty, the voting rights of EU members could in theory be suspended in 
the event of a ''serious and persistent breach" of fundamental 
principles such as respect for human rights.

For US public diplomacy objectives, the symbolism could not be more 
damaging -- America secretly interrogating prisoners in a Soviet-era 
compound within the former Soviet bloc. Russia has taken the step to 
deny that it has CIA prisons on its soil.

If the United States has been involved in ''enhanced interrogation" 
techniques at ''black sites" in Eastern Europe, American credibility as 
a standard-setter for human rights and the rule of law will suffer a 
major setback. Indeed, it was with US support that the nascent 
democracies of Eastern Europe made great strides to dismantle vestiges 
of authoritarian governance. In the first decade of the post-Communist 
era, new constitutions were passed outlawing secret detention and 
torture. Independent courts have been put in place to enforce these 
rules. Prisons in Eastern Europe have been made more humane and livable 
in part because these nations, at US urging, signed the European 
Convention on Human Rights and other antitorture conventions. Indeed, 
the United States has spent millions to promote this kind of reform.

If the CIA has been hiding and interrogating important Al Qaeda captives 
at a Soviet-era compound in Eastern Europe, it would have had to do so 
with the assistance of foreign intelligence services. For the last 
decade and a half, the US government has been urging the new Eastern 
European democracies to cleanse their intelligence services of 
operatives who have worked on behalf of others.

If reports of CIA-run interrogation facilities are true, it shows a 
blatant disregard for the law, and it will reshape America's global 
image. It will also undermine our strategic objectives to promote 
democracy and human rights. Moreover, torture does not work. Senator 
John McCain, a torture victim, wrote in a recent Newsweek article: ''In 
my experience, abuse of prisoners often produces bad intelligence 
because under torture a person will say anything he thinks his captors 
want to hear -- whether it is true or false -- if he believes it will 
relieve his suffering."

An editorial several months after 9/11 in the Prague Post warned of 
this: ''For Eastern Europe, the value the US places on individual 
freedom and human rights has been a beacon. But a beacon can be swiftly 
extinguished. Meddling with the terms of justice, the current US 
administration may be doing irreparable harm to a vision of uniform 
fairness that defines the American national essence and certifies its 
institutional contribution to human history."

Even with 9/11, this could have been the American epoch, a time when the 
best of American values were propagated across the world. Instead, 
events like this have set us back.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/11/22/torture_reports_tarnish_us_image/
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