Politics: Politics of War And Torture Of Terrorists: Is The U.S. Torturing Prisoners?

Amnesty International's (AI) international director, Larry Cox, charged that "War outsourcing is creating the corporate equivalent of Guantánamo Bay — a virtual rules-free zone in which perpetrators are not likely to be held accountable for breaking the law."

At the same time, the international organization condemned Prime Minister Tony Blair's government in Britain for similarly eroding what had been understood as bans on the use of torture.

It was not known whether AI's criticism of either government will be mentioned when Prime Minister Blair flies to Washington on Thursday.

Reporting on AI's charges against Great Britain, the chief of the organization's U.K. branch said you couldn't fight terror while engaging in torture.

"You cannot extinguish fire with petrol," the BBC quoted AI's Irene Khan as saying.

Part of AI's condemnation of American activities included a plea to European nations to deny their airspace to U.S. flights which might be carrying prisoners subject to abuse.

Media have reported that the U.S. administration of President George W. Bush has sought to evade international prohibitions of torture by transporting prisoners to "third countries" where detention and interrogation might take place unimpeded by human rights restraints.

Germany's Deutsche Welle observed that AI criticized "the 'war on terror' as the source of massive human-rights infractions, especially regarding the transport of prisoners through European airspace by secret service agencies."

AI's Secretary-General Irene Khan singled out the United States for particular criticism in connection with its war on terror.

"Powerful governments are playing a dangerous game with human rights," Voice of America quoted Ms. Khan as saying. "Those with power and influence -- the United States, European Union members, China and Russia -- have been either complicit or compromised by human-rights violations in 2005, at home and abroad."

Of particular concern to Ms. Khan is the continued detention by the United States of "Some 460 people of around 40 different nationalities [who] remain in Guantánamo, and their desperation is evident in the number of suicide attempts -- in one case 12 times -- and hunger strikes. Guantánamo is a powder keg, waiting to explode," she warned.

Summarizing his assessment of AI's conclusions, U.S. director Cox is quoted in Tuesday's New York Times as saying that, "It is difficult to believe that the United States government, which once considered itself as an exemplar of human rights, has sacrificed its most fundamental principle by abusing prisoners as a matter of policy, by 'disappearing' detainees into a network of secret prisons and by abducting and sending people for interrogation to countries that practice torture such as Egypt, Syria and Morocco."

Do you think it matters precisely how we're treating detainees taken in the war against terrorism?

• Now The U.S. Has A Policy of Torture
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