The Exportation of Torture

A Swiss newspaper and a German television station discovered in the Romanian capital of Bucharest a house that was used by the CIA to imprison and torture suspects detained in the so-called “war on terror.”

Now in Bucharest, the same is happening as previously in Vilnius, Lithuania and in Poland. Step by step, nearly always as the result of unofficial investigations, a network of terror is being revealed that is mounted by Washington in Europe — and also on other continents — with pretext the war on terror. This does not take into account the numerous diversionary maneuvers and lies by the heads of various European Union countries about having permitted their air space to be utilized for illegal flights that transported detainees under the watch of the CIA. It is also significant that the secret American prisons have been built in countries which, until 1990, belonged to the Warsaw Pact and came under NATO’s jurisdiction and, later, to the European Union.

According to journalists’ investigation, the prison in Budapest had the romantic code name “Bright Light” and was rented by the CIA to a Romanian organization, ORNISS (National Registry Office for Classified Information), that stores and processes secret information from the European Union and NATO.

ORNISS denies having done this; the CIA refuses to comment. Under “Bright Light,” but certainly in gritty enough buildings, the lackeys of the CIA detained people and extracted confessions through torture — conduct that American law prevents in their own country. These extrajudicial maneuvers similarly had a code name, “Extraordinary Rendition,” also paradoxical because there is nothing extraordinary about a human being cracking under the effects of torture. The work of journalists and an investigation of the European Council, which the CIA considered “partial and distorted,” demonstrated that in these secret prisons in foreign territories, from Guantanamo to Vilnius, from Abu Ghraib to Bucharest, American agents used methods of torture such as sleep deprivation, forcing prisoners to stand for hours and what became its trademark, waterboarding, subjecting detainees to simulated drowning.

It will be said that the victims are not saints and were suspected of organizing and participating in terrorist attacks, including Sept. 11. That may well be. But the word “suspect” leaves no doubt, it is intended for those who are not proven guilty and, according to the principles of those who, in this case, have them in their power, guilt cannot be extracted through torture.

It is hypocrisy in the style of Friar Thomas; look at what he says and not what he does. It is a rare day that American leaders and allies do not preach a sermon on human rights, on the state of rights, on combating torture and on illegal detentions, and then all these pious intentions crumbled between four walls of a sordid hovel in Bucharest.

Torture does not stop being torture when practiced in the country of others who, in their own country, keep up the appearance of the rule of law, of the superiority of morals and of civilization.