U.S. TORTURE ON TRIAL

European authorities are proving more determined than the Bush administration in cracking down on torture as a wartime intelligence device. While the U.S. Justice Department has mostly prosecuted enlisted men and women for torturing prisoners, European judges have now indicted several dozen CIA operatives on charges of kidnapping suspected terrorists and flying them to secret prisons for interrogation said often to involve torture.

An Italian judge indicted 26 Americans last Friday, most of them CIA officers, heading toward the first trial of what the Bush administration calls “extraordinary rendition” and critics call outsourcing torture. Last month, German prosecutors issued arrest warrants for 13 suspected CIA agents in connection with the alleged abduction and torture of a Lebanese-born German citizen.

A parliamentary committee of the European Union has reported at least 1,245 CIA flights in Europe, some of them carrying kidnapped suspects. The committee suggested either active collusion or tacit approval of the flights by several European governments.

Several hurdles must be crossed before the cases come to trial. The accused Americans, indicted under fictitious names, have left the countries, so Italy and Germany would have to approve the indictments and request extradition. The United States would have to agree.

The indictments and arrest warrants focus world scrutiny not only on the rendition program but, more broadly, on the U.S. use of such interrogation aids as “waterboarding,” in which a suspect is made to feel that he or she is drowning.

President Bush has said repeatedly that this country does not engage in torture, but he has declared the right to interpret a statute prohibiting torture.

The United Nations Convention Against Torture, which the Senate accepted as U.S. law in 1994, says that “no exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency may be invoked as a justification for torture.” Leading U.S. military officers deny that torture is effective in extracting useful information, since the victims typically will say anything to end their ordeal.

Nonetheless, the idea persists, in some official thinking and among the American public, that torture is sometimes justified.

An article in the current New Yorker reports that leading administration figures are fans of “24,” a popular current Fox channel counterterrorism thriller that routinely presents torture as justified and practical as a last resort when a fictional city is about to be destroyed or a high official assassinated.

Meanwhile, the real U.S. government continues to find ways to get around the legal prohibitions and their own pledges to eschew torture.

European outrage and prosecution, with the disclosure of details of the secret kidnappings and torture camps, may help persuade the American government and its people to turn their backs on torture once and for all.