Outsourcing The Dirty Work

Overseas, the investigation into the secret CIA flights through Europe to secret prisons in the Eastern Bloc and across the globe deepens. And nobody's coming out looking good in this one:

EUROPEAN governments knew that so-called CIA "torture flights", some of which landed in Edinburgh, were taking place, investigators said today.

The head of a European investigation into the transportation of terrorist suspects also said that evidence pointed to the existence of a system of "outsourcing" of torture by the US and that it was highly likely that European governments knew of it.

But Swiss senator Dick Marty said there was no formal evidence so far of the existence of clandestine detention centres in Romania or Poland as alleged by the New York-based Human Rights Watch. Mr Marty's comments follow accusations fired at the Scottish Executive that it knew about torture flights landing at Edinburgh and other Scottish international airports.

The SNP said the Executive had turned a blind eye to the situation and published pictures of alleged CIA planes at Edinburgh Airport. The party also compiled a dossier which lists in detail the planes and the dates on which they landed while allegedly operating for front companies of the CIA.

Today Mr Marty said: "There is a great deal of coherent, convergent evidence pointing to the existence of a system of 'relocation' or 'outsourcing' of torture."

[Bush's own relationship to outsourcing is complicated: in 2004, one of his more highly-trusted economic advisors, who had penned much of Bush's economic speeches, claimed that, in the long run, moving American jobs overseas to third world, non-regulated countries, really wasn't a bad thing. I'm sure that those who lose the jobs were pretty excited to hear that news.]

The American moral outrage over their country's practice of outsourcing torture [both to brutalist foreign countries where torture is the norm and to private contractors working directly with intelligence, and military personel] is still lacking. Of course, if the opposition were to intimately tie this outrage into the embattled presidency, they'd have a long list to consult.

And it's no surprise that some, if not many, of the European nations are complicit in this. But the European population at least seems to recognize that these programs are reprehensible, and that their leadership must face at least some form of political accountability. Hopefully, Americans decide that, among all of the ridiculously bad ideas this Administration has forced upon the world in their name, torture is among one of the worst.