Editorial: Come clean on secret prisons

Wednesday, Dec. 7, 2005 | 8:51 a.m.

In public, Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice is avoiding the question of whether the United States operates secret prisons outside the country to detain and interrogate terrorism suspects. Before leaving Monday for Europe, where many of the prisons are said to be, Rice said the United States does not torture suspects and "does not transport, and has not transported, detainees from one country to another for the purpose of interrogation using torture."

She also said that captured terrorists "do not fit easily into traditional systems of criminal or military justice. We have to adapt."

But Rice never directly answered the one question that foreign leaders, including leaders of the European Union, are asking: Has the United States set up prisons in our country whose purpose and locations are unknown to us? In most countries such prisons would be illegal.

Relying on confidential sources from within intelligence and diplomatic circles, The Washington Post disclosed the possibility of the prisons' existence in a Nov. 2 story.

A White House adviser, Stephen Hadley, talked about Rice's European trip and the prisons issue on CNN's "Late Edition." "There are things that are going to be said and can be said privately in communications with governments," he said. Private conversations, however, exclude the people, who have a right to know.

In our view, the Bush administration should give a straight -- and public -- answer to the prisons question. Human rights is an issue the United States presses with other countries, and we should have nothing to hide when it comes to the treatment and location of our own prisoners.