Condi Rice does damage control in Europe on the torture issue:
U.S. obligations under the U.N. Convention Against Torture, which prohibits cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, extend as "a matter of policy" to "U.S. personnel wherever they are, whether they are in the United States or outside of the United States," [Secretary of State Condoleezza] Rice said [in Kiev Wednesday] at a news conference with Ukraine's president, Viktor Yushchenko. [. . .]"Our people, wherever they are, are operating under U.S. law and U.S. obligations."
Senate leaders welcomed this apparent change in the Administration's official line as a yielding to dual pressure from world opinion and from Congress, where Senator John McCain's bill banning not only torture but lesser forms of inhuman and degrading treatment, overwhelmingly passed by the Senate, is also expected to pass handily in the House. But White House spokesman Scott McClellan asserted that "Rice was only expressing existing policy":
McClellan's comment appears to be based on a written answer that Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales gave in late October to a question posed by the Senate Judiciary Committee. In answer to Question 158, Gonzales wrote that the administration's policy is to abide by provisions barring cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment "even if such compliance is not legally required, regardless of whether the detainee in question is held in the United States or overseas."Those words, buried in the document, passed largely unnoticed and the new policy was never publicly articulated until Rice spoke in Kiev on Wednesday.
I may be a cynic, but it seems to me that this just means torture and degradation, like customer service and technical support, are now going to be outsourced. The governments of quite a few countries, including (to my own knowledge) but not limited to Romania, are eager to reap the benefits of helping us in any way they can, almost certainly including the dirty work that the U.S. would rather officially keep off its own hands.
This may be immoral, but it's also inevitable, and it's probably even necessary. My own fear is of the indiscriminate maltreatment of "suspects," which often means innocents. We have to try to break al Qaeda, and we have to find out as much about what they're planning as we can. Let's face it, after the McCain bill is passed, bad things will still be happening to bad people in bad places for our protection. It's probably as it should be that that is kept off the books.
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