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The government’s response to these allegations is to call for an immediate end to all practices that may involve human rights abuses. Just kidding! The CIA “has asked the Justice Department to open a criminal investigation to determine the source of a Washington Post article that said the agency had set up a covert prison network in Eastern Europe and other countries to hold important terrorism suspects,” according to another Nov. 9 Times article by David Johnston and Carl Hulse. The article also mentioned that the Senate rejected a commission to examine detainee abuse. Jehl cited the “Bush administration view that any ban on cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment under the [Convention Against Torture] treaty does not apply to CIA interrogations because they take place overseas on people who are not citizens of the United States.” So the CIA wants the heads of those who let this information get out; the Senate doesn’t want to know about it; and the Bush administration thinks everything’s fine.

The only surprise is that the media covered it at all. These policies are nothing new. Following WWII the U.S. recruited high-ranking Nazis rather than try them for crimes against humanity. As outlined in Christopher Simpson’s book “Blowback,” this includes SS officers like Klaus Barbie, called the “Butcher of Lyon” for his role as head of the Gestapo in Lyon, France. The recruited Nazis assisted in suppressing resistance to American occupations, spied on the Soviets, or passed on interrogation techniques.

The School of the Americas (SOA) was founded in order to impart tactics derived from these Nazi methods to death squads and “counter-insurgency” specialists in Latin America. Just like the government reaction to the current events, when the public started becoming aware of the SOA’s links to massive human rights violations in numerous countries, instead of stopping the abuses they simply changed the name of the SOA to the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation. The name is new but the policies are the same.

Many arguments by critics are weak or only procedural. For instance, a Nov. 14 Times op-ed by M. Gregg Bloche and Jonathan H. Marks says “the Pentagon cannot point to any intelligence gains resulting from the techniques that have so tarnished America’s image.” The main argument of the entire editorial seems to be that we shouldn’t torture prisoners because it’s ineffective and tarnishes America’s image abroad. I’m certain Abed Hamed Mowhoush, an Iraqi major general cited in the opinion piece, deeply felt the horror of America’s image being tarnished as he died of asphyxiation at the hands of the Americans interrogating him.

Jehl wrote of a recent legal opinion by the Justice Department, claiming that interrogation methods “just short of those that might cause pain comparable to organ failure, impairment of bodily function or even death” are okay and are not torture. How many times do you have to pass out or be suffocated before “unusual punishment” crosses the line into “torture?” Is it okay if it doesn’t cross that line? It’s very instructive about our government’s regard of human rights that such a debate even exists. A friend of mine summed it up well: “Torture is bad.” You shouldn’t need to show that it’s ineffective, or point to a law, to stop human rights abuses, and quibbling over whether a particular tactic is torture or only an “interrogation technique” loses sight of this. There can be no justification for abusing prisoners, and the Pentagon and CIA need to stop it no