Also this issue:

A Friend to the End
Rick Santorum's questionable defense of Trent Lott.
-J.J. Balaban

Letters to the Editor

January 2- 8, 2003

loose canon

Torture By Hire

by Bruce Schimmel

Which is worse: someone who kills, or someone who hires somebody to do his killing for him?

Not a difficult choice. There is evil simple, and there is evil compounded by hypocrisy. Whether rabbi or consigliere, those who hide behind hit men suffer the meanest torments of hell.

Those were my thoughts when I recently received two stories about governments who flaunt international law. (My thanks to John Jonik for e-mailing these items to me.)

One of those governments is Israel. The second is the United States.

The human rights violations of Israel are well-known. Among Israel's offenses, Amnesty International lists collective punishment, violence against non-combatants and the occasional torture of prisoners, mostly in the form of random beatings with rifle butts.

But the secret and systematic torture of detainees in American hands has been revealed only recently in a Dec. 26 investigation published in The Washington Post. If confirmed, the story deserves both a Pulitzer for reporting and a Nobel for hopefully invigorating what little is left of America's conscience.

The prisoners in question are not those incarcerated anonymously in America, nor those held in legal limbo in Guantanamo Bay. There, prisoners receive at least marginal humanitarian oversight.

The prisoners in question are those being held secretly by the CIA in places like Bagram, Afghanistan and in Diego Garcia, an island in the Indian Ocean.

These prisoners are secreted beyond reach of national law and international treaties. And even as our government has seen fit to reduce the rights of Americans at home under the guise of a war, these captured combatants, held abroad, get none of the protections as prisoners of war.

At war or not, when America signed the Geneva Convention of 1949 we agreed to treat any prisoner, any detainee, humanely. But, according to the Post, hundreds of prisoners are being abused, if not downright tortured.

And worse still, those who do not acquiesce to the aggressive questioning of the American CIA are being sent -- along with a convenient list of questions -- to be tortured in places like Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Egypt, Jordan and Morocco.

These are countries that our own State Department has blacklisted as torturers -- while apparently employing them to do our dirty work.

These countries may be America's contract torturers, but we are worse.

For if true, as those issuing the orders, we are lower than the criminals behind whom we hide.