DISPATCHES FROM AMERICA Impunity at home, rendition abroad

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http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/NH16Dj02.html

After a decade of fiery public debate and bare-knuckle partisan brawling, the United States has stumbled toward an ad hoc bipartisan compromise over the issue of torture that rests on two unsustainable policies: impunity at home and rendition abroad.

President Barack Obama has closed the CIA's "black sites", its secret prisons where American agents once dirtied their hands with waterboarding and wall slamming. But via rendition - the sending of terrorist suspects to the prisons of countries that torture - and related policies, his administration has outsourced human rights abuse to Afghanistan, Somalia, and elsewhere. In this way, he has avoided the political stigma of torture, while



tacitly tolerating such abuses and harvesting whatever intelligence can be gained from them.

This "resolution" of the torture issue may meet the needs of this country's deeply divided politics. It cannot, however, long satisfy an international community determined to prosecute human rights abuses through universal jurisdiction. It also runs the long-term risk of another sordid torture scandal that will further damage US standing with allies worldwide.

Perfecting a new form of torture
The modern American urge to use torture did not, of course, begin on September 12, 2001. It has roots that reach back to the beginning of the Cold War and a human rights policy riven with contradictions. Publicly, Washington opposed torture and led the world in drafting the United Nation's Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 and the Geneva Conventions in 1949. Simultaneously and secretly, however, the Central Intelligence Agency began developing ingenious new torture techniques in contravention of these same international conventions.