David Ignatius, in his March 9 column in the Washington Post, “Rendition Realities,” makes a good faith attempt to decouple “rendition”—the act of sending suspected terrorists to foreign countries for interrogation—from torture—the act of inflicting pain for the purpose of extracting information. Ignatius suggests that there may be appropriate reasons for exporting detainees for interrogation. The essay, however, falls far short of its goal of justifying limited, appropriate rendition. Indeed, by the final paragraph of his piece, Ignatius finds himself knee-deep in contradiction. He begins by suggesting that critics of rendition (such as me) may be greatly overstating the link between rendition and surrogate torture. Here is his explanation:

“The problem with this argument is that it assumes that 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.”

While I'm sure that this is an accurate account of Ignatius' personal experience, it completely misses the point. Yes, if you interview an intelligence agent in some formal setting, he will almost always give you the conventional line that torture is counterproductive. But in times of crisis, when information has dried up, when superiors are demanding better intelligence, few agents in the field believe this in their gut. Rather, they believe that if they can just ratchet up the level of pain a notch, the detainee will soon become a fount of valuable intelligence. If this weren’t the case, we wouldn’t be seeing--pardon the term--“tortured” memos coming out of the Justice Department and Pentagon, attempting to justify the mistreatment of detainees. We wouldn’t be seeing hair-splitting arguments by the White House and the Defense Department over who is and isn’t covered by the Geneva Conventions. Nor would we see the pandemic of murder and brutality that has flowed not only from Abu Ghraib, but from detention centers in Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay, the Baghdad Airport, and Diego Garcia, in the Indian Ocean, not to mention the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, New York, where petty immigration violators were systematically brutalized after 9/11.

A second glaring problem with Ignatius’ defense of selective rendition is that he assumes that the CIA and army behave in a fully rational manner. No rational organization would have operated in the lax, cavalier, indifferent manner of the US military command with respect to the treatment of Iraqi detainees. For example, it took no particular foresight or wisdom to know in advance that brutality against detainees would be a significant ethical and public relations concern in Iraq. It took no particular insight to realize that mistreatment of detainees could have a highly toxic effect on our attempt to win over the Iraqi citizenry. Despite this, prior to the Abu Ghraib revelations, no safeguards whatsoever were in place to prevent excessive force. No serious oversight was exercised to guarantee that even under difficult circumstances, the US would adhere to democratic principles and to international law. To the contrary, available evidence suggests that soldiers on the ground were encouraged to circumvent international law.

Moreover, recent information from Guantanamo Bay indicates that not only were Guantanamo prisoners mistreated, they were mistreated in ways that directly targeted their religious beliefs. It is amazing for example, that the American press has paid such scant attention to the fact that American female operatives went so far as to pretend to smear menstrual blood on Islamic detainees so as to make them feel unclean, disrupt their prayer, and destabilize them psychologically. However, the fact that these indecorous acts have gotten little press in the US doesn’t mean that the rest of the world hasn’t taken notice. Simply put, if we want to incite and recruit more terrorists, there is no more efficient way than to commit outrages like smearing menstrual blood on Islamic detainees.

White House officials must have been gnashing their teeth on Sunday, as they watched former CIA agent Mike Scheuer—the man who set up the rendition program—discuss the practice of rendition on “60 Minutes” with a kind of breezy, deranged candor. Check out this exchange between correspondent Scott Pelley and Scheuer about the rendering of detainees to Egypt: