Yesterday, BTC News noted secretary of state Condi Rice’s plea for people to “stop making excuses for terrorists.” Today, via Newsweek, we note that the US has provided yet another such excuse.

In the “Perisope” column of the magazine’s August 8 issue, reporter Michael Isikoff writes about a 2002 FBI memo advising against “rendering” a terrorism suspect to a country where torture is routine in order to avoid the necessity of torturing him in the US.

In a memo forwarded to a senior FBI lawyer on Nov. 27, 2002, a supervisory special agent from the bureau’s behavioral analysis unit offered a legal analysis of interrogation techniques that had been approved by Pentagon officials for use against a high-value Qaeda detainee. After objecting to techniques such as exploiting “phobias” like “the fear of dogs” or dripping water “to induce the misperception of drowning,” the agent discussed a plan to send the detainee to Jordan, Egypt or an unspecified third country for interrogation. “In as much as the intent of this category is to utilize, outside the U.S., interrogation techniques which would violate [U.S. law] if committed in the U.S., it is a per se violation of the U.S. Torture Statute,” the agent wrote. “Discussing any plan which includes this category could be seen as a con-spiracy to violate [the Torture Statute]” and “would inculpate” everyone involved.

According to Isikoff, the author of the memo is a former New York City prosecutor who has since left the FBI. No one Isikoff interviewd for the story would speak on the record, but an anonymous FBI official told him that the memo reflected concerns voiced not just by its author, but by a number of other FBI agents and attorneys.

The Bush administration enjoy pretending that terrorists exist in a bubble through which no external stimuli can osmose. “They just hate us,” say administration heavies such as Rice and the putative president, “no matter what we do, and there’s nothing to be done but kill them.” It’s a pretense joined in order to avoid taking responsibility for the things we do that enable terrorists to enlarge the pool of available recruits.

But we know, anyone with a lick of sense knows, that when the US talks of spreading freedom and democracy with one voice and orders suspected terrorists off to other countries for torture with a second voice, we provide an opportunity for terrorists to proselytise against us and for their own causes.

The administration harbors individuals who have a lick of sense, even if collectively they don’t act like it. They know that CDs of the Abu Ghraib photos are selling like hotcakes in Iraq and throughout the Middle East. They know that this Newsweek story, which is pretty much guaranteed to be more solidly sourced than the infamous “Koran in the toilet” one, will be translated and printed up on posterboard wherever terrorist recruiters think the ground is fertile.

And they know there are dozens of other stories just like it waiting to be broken, and dozens more that will arise from the administration’s refusal to moderate their own behavior and that of the agencies they control. The likelihood that anyone in the White House or the Pentagon will be made to suffer any consequences of such propaganda windfalls for terrorists is near zero; the likelihood that US troops or civilians or both will suffer from it is near absolute.

But so it goes. Secretary Rice will continue insisting that no U.S. barbarity has any impact on the ability of al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations to recruit doomed souls for barbarities aimed at us, and those captains of terror will continue laughing all the way to the barbarity bank.

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