Americans accustomed to taking their leaders' words at face value perhaps can be forgiven, at least until now, for believing the unbelievable. But enough details have recently come to light about the Bush administration's handling of terror suspects to make anyone aware of them thoroughly repulsed and deeply ashamed.

There is no escaping that this administration has undermined the nation's highest ideals, thereby jeopardizing its moral leadership in the world. It is now clear that it also has jeopardized its ability to bring terror suspects to justice.

Discussions of torture invariably deal both with questions of morality and effectiveness. In truth, torture fails both tests, as Douglas Johnson writes on Page AA1. But while our leaders state flatly that it doesn't work and that the United States does not torture, thereby seeming to agree that torture is immoral, they have acted otherwise. They have redefined what torture is, they have allowed U.S. personnel to engage in abusive "enhanced techniques" of interrogation and they have "renditioned" detainees to nations known to torture under any definition.

The news caught up with U.S. behavior several times this fall, and as it did, the extent to which American officials' words collide with their deeds became clearer and clearer.

First was the spectacle of lobbying by CIA Director Porter Goss and Vice President Dick Cheney against an amendment to the Senate's Pentagon spending bill that outlaws U.S. personnel from engaging in "cruel, inhuman and degrading" treatment of prisoners. They sought an exemption for the CIA -- even as Goss was asserting flatly, "This agency does not torture." Then, early this month, the Washington Post exposed a secret string of CIA prisons in Eastern Europe and Asia where treatment most would term cruel, inhuman and degrading takes place.

A couple of weeks later we saw the United States refuse to allow U.N. special investigators free access to meet with detainees alone at Guantánamo Bay prison, eliciting this from the United Nations: "It is particularly disappointing that the United States government, which has consistently declared its commitment to the principles of independence and objectivity of the fact-finding mechanisms, was not in a position to accept these terms."

Then there was the startling news, just before Thanksgiving, that the United States had decided to charge the notorious José Padilla not with plotting to set off a "dirty bomb," but rather with lesser crimes. Why? Because two detainees who might have been called to testify had been subjected to treatment that a CIA inspector general deemed "excessive," and that anyone but the administration would define as torture. U.S. officials told the New York Times that any effort to introduce testimony by the two "could have opened the way for defense lawyers to expose details about their detention and interrogation in secret jails that the Central Intelligence Agency has worked hard to keep out of public light."

Thus the Bush administration has not only damaged America's moral standing in the world but its practical ability to try terror suspects as well -- all as a result of undermining, in secret, the nation's moral principles.

© 2005 Star Tribune

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