Report: CIA transferred detainees without notice

From the Los Angeles Times via the Houston Chronicle:

A report that the CIA secretly transferred detainees out of Iraq for interrogation without notifying the Red Cross drew criticism Sunday from key members of Congress.

"The thing that separates us from the enemy is our respect for human rights," Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said on ABC's This Week.

McCain was responding to a report in Sunday's Washington Post that as many as a dozen detainees had been moved out of Iraq over the past six months, a possible violation of the Geneva Conventions.

The Post cited a draft Justice Department opinion, written in March, as saying that the CIA can take Iraqis from their country for interrogation for a "brief but not indefinite period." Intelligence officials have not disclosed the names or the locations of the detainees removed from Iraq.

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This article doesn't speculate, but I wonder if this falls into the category of detainees farmed out for torture. Ever since the Afghanistan invasion, there have been reports about prisoners of US forces being sent to Egypt or Saudi Arabia for interrogation precisely because those nations practice torture, and I don't mean of the Abu Ghraib variety: I'm talking about electrodes on genitals, that sort of thing. At any rate, this is yet more evidence of how the Bush administration says "what violation of the Geneva convention?" while giving a wink and a nod to soldiers in the field.

America may very well have better political values (on paper at any rate) than any other nation in the world; the problem is that our leaders seem to ignore them on a regular basis.

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