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The Wall Street Journal March 9, 2005 COMMENTARY Rendering Justice By DAVID IGNATIUS The Washington Post March 9, 2005 WASHINGTON -- Torture is immoral and illegal, and the refusal to allow it is one measure of a civilized society. But this ironclad moral argument doesn't necessarily apply to the practice known as "extraordinary rendition." Rendition is the CIA's antiseptic term for its practice of sending captured terrorist suspects to other countries for interrogation. Because some of those countries torture prisoners -- and because some of the suspected terrorists "rendered" by the CIA say they were, in fact, tortured -- the debate has tended to lump rendition and torture together. The implication is that the CIA is sending people to Egypt, Jordan or other Middle Eastern countries because they can be tortured there and coerced into providing information they wouldn't give up otherwise. The problem with this argument is that it assumes the CIA believes that torture works. But in 30 years of writing about intelligence, I've never encountered a spook who didn't realize that torture is usually counterproductive. Professional intelligence officers know that prisoners will confess to anything under intense pain. Information obtained through torture thus tends to be unreliable, in addition to being immoral. But in conversations over the past several years with senior CIA officials and the heads of several Arab intelligence services, I've heard explanations for why the practice is used. These arguments for rendition at least ought to be understood, as Congress and the public struggle with the moral issues involved. What's gained by transferring a prisoner to his home country for interrogation is emotional leverage, according to Arab and American intelligence chiefs. A hardened al Qaeda member often can't be coerced physically into giving up information, no matter how nasty the interrogator. But he may do so if confronted by, say, his mother, father, brother or sister. I asked the head of an Arab intelligence service once about the belief in his country that prisoners were tortured. People sometimes referred to his headquarters as the "fingernail factory," I said, because they assumed that vicious methods were used, such as ripping out prisoners' nails. This official insisted that torture didn't work. He cited a series of cases in which prisoners had been broken through softer and more clever measures -- applying family pressure or, in one remarkable case, ignoring a defiant, self-important prisoner until he all but demanded to be questioned. "Nice" interrogation stories don't change the fact that hideous methods have been used in rendition cases. And in some instances, the CIA should have known that torture was likely -- and stopped it. But I think you can oppose torture and still approve of rendition in some cases. Before you make an easy judgment about rendition, consider this disturbing question: Suppose the FBI had managed to capture Mohamed Atta before Sept. 11, 2001. Under U.S. legal rules at the time, the man who plotted the airplane suicide attacks probably could not have been held or interrogated in the U.S. Would it have made sense to "render" Atta to a place where he could have been interrogated? That's not a simple question for me to answer, even as I share the conviction that torture is always and everywhere wrong. -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED]> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' ------------------------ Yahoo! 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