Critics compare U.S. anti-terrorism practices to ‘gulag’

WASHINGTON – Secret prisons in Eastern Europe. Illegal detentions. Suspects snatched off the streets and shipped without extradition to other countries for harsh interrogation. Government directives cloaked in secrecy.

A flashback to Stalin’s Soviet Union?

Hardly.

To hear some European critics of the Bush administration tell it, this all describes current practices of the world’s most powerful and open democracy – the United States.

Dismay over Washington’s covert intelligence practices and the seizures of suspected terrorists has swept Europe. It has challenged the administration’s credibility and tarnished the nation’s status as the premier defender of human rights.

The treatment of captured militants also has set off a fierce debate in Congress.

“You don’t want serious people to believe that the American government does things that decent people don’t do,” said Michael Mandelbaum, professor of American foreign policy at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

“I don’t know if it’s true or not, but obviously the suspicions are out there,” said Mandelbaum, author of the forthcoming book, “The Case for Goliath: How America Acts as the World’s Government in the 21st Century.”

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had to contend with the torture and prison-camp issue at every stop on a five-day visit to Europe. The trip was intended to rebuild U.S. relations with its allies that were frayed by the Iraq war.

The European leaders with whom Rice met seemed to accept her reassurances that the U.S. did not practice torture and would punish those who broke the rules. But these leaders also have to contend with a rising uproar among their citizens.

Some European commentators and politicians are suggesting that the U.S. has established its own “gulag” system in its zeal to fight global terrorism.

Administration supporters scoffed at such comparisons. They note that hundreds of thousands of prisoners were held – and thousands died – in the forced labor camps run by Soviet leader Josef Stalin.

The alleged covert U.S. program contains only a few dozen suspected al-Qaida members, they suggested.

The administration has neither confirmed nor denied that the CIA maintains such prisons in former Soviet-bloc nations. Even so, Rice told reporters in Belgium that the administration “is quite clear and quite determined to carry out the president’s policy … that the United States does not engage in torture, doesn’t condone it, doesn’t expect its employees to engage in it.”

Some U.S. officials privately say that some European leaders, while complaining about U.S. anti-terrorist policies, quietly are cooperating with such programs in their countries.

Reports about secret CIA prisons and the forced flying of suspected terrorists to third countries for interrogation follows reports of prisoner mistreatment at Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib prison and at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

In June, Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., created a tempest when he compared the U.S. treatment of suspected terrorists at Guantanamo Bay to conduct “by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags” or other totalitarian regimes. He apologized in the Senate after the White House and its allies in Congress expressed outrage.

Yet the treatment of detainees remains hotly debated in Congress. It soon may come to a head on legislation by Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., that would ban the “cruel, inhuman and degrading” treatment of foreigners in U.S. custody and require U.S. troops to follow interrogation procedures in the Army Field Manual.

The administration has opposed McCain’s proposal, which the Senate passed overwhelmingly. White House spokesman Scott McClellan said the administration was “working very hard” with McCain and other congressional leaders in search of a “good solution.”

“We face a lot of difficult issues in this different kind of war that we’re engaged in,” McClellan said.

Vice President Dick Cheney has lobbied Congress to exempt the CIA from any such torture ban. It’s a stance that clearly did not simplify Rice’s job of convincing Europeans that the professed zero tolerance for torture by the U.S. was for real.

McCain has said there should be no exemptions to the torture ban because “if you do that, then you carve out exceptions – and then you end up with gulags.”