What to do with the Innocent: Hide them!

I happen to be in the midst of reading Jimmy Carter's new book, Our Endangered Values: America's Moral Crisis. Just now, I came across a passage that struck me as particularly apt in light of the treatment of Mr. El-Masri (the German citizen) after he had been tortured by US agents in Afghanistan and eventually cleared of any wrongdoing, which I blogged about yesterday.

In this passage, Carter has been discussing the US policy to spirit suspects away to secret prisons in foreign lands to torture them, either torturing them ourselves or having others do it for us. He continues:

One serious consequence of this abominable procedure is the question of what to do with the tortured prisoners when they are proven innocent. Can they be released and free to give public testimony against the United States of America or even file lawsuits against our country, as a few of them have already done? Even if held in prison, some of them have become special problems because high-profile terrorists who were actually involved in the 9/11 attack have asked for them to be witnesses. Trials of these known criminals have been held in abeyance because we cannot affort to let the former or still-incarcerated detainees testify.

Instead of correcting our basic problem, more and more prisoners are being retained, and there is less access to the facts about their treatment. A report released in March 2005 by Human Rights First said that the number of detainees in US custody in Iraq and Afghanistan has grown, just during the preceding six months, from six thousand to more than eleven thousand, and that the level of secrecy surrounding American detention operations has intensified.

Where does this end? With everyone in detention, so nobody can testify about it? The more you think about what is being done in our name, the more detestable it becomes.