Financial Times (12.3.05).

Outsourcing torture.

[Editorial]

The outsourcing that should really bother Americans is "rendition" - the term used to describe their government's habit of handing certain terrorist suspects to countries practising torture or to secret detention sites abroad. This has apparently been going on since 2001 and there probably would have been no fresh fuss had Europeans not been roused by recent reports of their own governments' possible complicity. As holder of the European Union presidency, Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, has written to his US counterpart, Condoleeza Rice, to demand clarification. The latter should give a clear answer when she visits Europe next week.

The international ban on torture, to which the US is a party, equally forbids sending people to countries where they are likely to be tortured. Hard evidence is inevitably scarce in this murky business. But one clear case of this was a Canadian citizen of Syrian origin who was arrested in New York and dispatched to Syria where he suffered a year of brutal treatment, before being eventually returned to Canada.

Last month the Washington Post reported that the Central Intelligence Agency was using airports and secret prisons in several countries in eastern Europe and beyond to move and detain terrorist suspects. In terms of complicity in Europe, the US-based Human Rights Watch organisation pointed the finger at Poland and Romania.

So far the US administration's record has been one of catastrophic equivocation. In the wake of the revelations about US mistreatment of its prisoners in Iraq and at Guantánamo, President George W. Bush said the US does not practise torture or condone it by other countries. Yet Alberto Gonzales, his White House lawyer and now attorney- general, was on record as trying to construct a legal framework for torture. On Capitol Hill, John McCain, the Republican senator who was himself tortured by the Vietnamese, is seeking a fresh legislative ban on torture.

But Dick Cheney, vice-president, is still trying to carve out an exception for the CIA when it interrogates non-US citizens (a sub-category of humanity this administration often uses).

Regardless of the (im)morality of any justification of torture, it beggars belief that the Bush administration cannot see how counterproductive its attitude is. Even assuming that torture can produce insight into al-Qaeda (which many intelligence professionals doubt), it is surely far outweighted by the damage to US moral authority as "a nation under law" in what is, after all, a political battle for hearts and minds.

The only common sense course for Ms Rice next week is to come clean on the past, and give guarantees for the future.

As for European allies, if any were proved to be complicit in torture, they would deserve to lose their voting rights in the EU Council and be suspended from the Council of Europe.