Secret Prisons: Bush Iran Contra Redux

The news that CIA officers ran secret European jails as part of a plan to avoid legal niceties proves that President Bush is more like his dad than I thought.

A report by a Swiss Senator hired by the Council of Europe said recently that a secret US prison in Poland was used to detain and question "high value detainees" like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged architect of the 9-11 attacks, and suspected senior al-Qaida operative Abu Zubaydah were held in Poland. A secret CIA jail in Romania was used for detainees of "remarkable importance."

Why? Because the Bush White House believed that extraordinary and illegal measures were required to fight the war against terrorism. If the terrorists were detained in The Tombs in New York City they'd get ACLU lawyers, the right to remain silent and our whole country would be awash in Radical Muslim Fundamentalists before you could say Osama Bin Laden. So temporary secret prisons were set up in places that no one would think of asking about.

Like his father before him, George Bush decided that the American people were too stupid to understand the need to bend peacetime rules during time of war.

Our country was founded on guerilla war and, as a people, we have historically supported excessive force to defend our homeland, from the burning of Richmond to the atomic bombs in Japan. We've threatened to level Cuba and bomb Pakistan back into the Stone Age (how many grenades would that take?) and made no apologies about the need for self protection. So why did Bush I and Bush II assume that the American people were too lily-livered to support a few distasteful choices?

The European prisons mentioned in the report, as well as others in places like Germany, Egypt and Guantanamo Bay have only one function: to allow US intelligence operatives to break American law without detection. Jails are built for confinement and legitimate interrogation. Secret prisons are made for torture.

This whole thing reminds me of the Iran-Contra operation that was conceived and run out of the offices of then-Vice President George H.W. Bush.

The Reagan administration was convinced that the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua was bent on spreading Castro-style communism throughout Central America.

VP Bush was put in charge of that war.

From a series of safe houses in El Salvador and Honduras, Contra commandos (if you can call fat guys in Guayaberas "commandos") ran military incursions into Nicaragua. I was a newspaper reporter in Latin America when a Contra supply plane was shot down over Nicaragua. I tracked the operation back to a safe house in San Salvador and got the calling records from that address from ANTEL, the Salvadoran telephone company. The records showed calls directly to the VP's office in Washington D.C., many more were the homes and haunts of his staff (I would have thought as former Director of Central Intelligence George Bush would have demanded better trade-craft). The story was initially denied as "liberal propaganda." Later several members of the VP's staff broke down and confirmed their participation (Some numbers on the ANTEL bill were listed to homes of the girlfriends of married VP staffers. At least one member of the band of Vice Presidential patriots agreed to confess to gun running "on the record" in exchange for my promise of not printing the specifics of his domestic duplicity. I continue to maintain my promise not to name the individual.)

The Contra debate got so heated that Congress eventually enacted the Boland Amendment, making it illegal to give the Nicaraguans money.

In order to get around that law, the Bushies decided to develop an alternate funding source: They sold arms to Iran, our nominal number one world enemy, in return for assistance in releasing hostages held by Hezbollah. The profits from the arms sales would stay off the books and be sent to the Contras.

In the days after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, Bush's top intelligence advisors -- many of whom had directly participated in or were close to the Iran Contra operation -- told the president that the nation was in a non-traditional war that required non-traditional tactics.

Before anyone gets their knickers in a knot about my supposed bias, let me state unequivocally that I agree with the need for non-traditional tactics. And, I believe that the government needs to keep certain information, especially tactical military information, secret for a discrete period of time.

But a strategy based on lack of trust is doomed to failure.

America is a land of rules. We are also a people who understand that tough times require tough choices. If a limited suspension of the right of Habeus Corpus for selected "enemy combatants" would prevent another terror attack, go ahead and suspend it. (Note the word "limited," I mean does anyone believe that imprisoning countless halfwits in Guantanamo or other secret prisons has kept the US safe over the past five years?)

What was the outcome of the Iran Contra affair? Ollie North became a radio star, an election was held in Nicaragua and the Sandinistas were voted out. This January, Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega was elected president and currently holds office. Fidel Castro is breathing his last breaths and democracy reigns, more or less, in Central America.

What was the outcome of the secret prisons affair? We don't know because the Bush administration is only barely acknowledging their existence rather than detailing what good they provided (of that they hoped would be provided).

We Americans are willing to give our elected leaders the benefit of the doubt. The idea of secret prisons, just like trading with an enemy to pay blackmail ransom and provide materiel leftovers for political allies, is so un-American that we would need a lot of help in supporting the idea. But given the right circumstances, secret prisons could be acceptable.

If President Bush would simply fess up to the American people and say something like, "We are fighting a new kind of war; we tried some stuff that wasn't strictly according to Hoyle. Some of it worked, some of it didn't, but our hearts were in the right place. The Polish prison was productive. The Romanian one, well, if we could have a do-over we wouldn't have done the Romanian prison."

Words like that could make the whole secret prison debate go away in a heartbeat.

Instead what you'll hear is vitriol and blame of anyone who believes in the US Constitution.

Secret prisons strike me as un-American.

A president lying to the nation should be un-American but apparently it is not.