The detainees are reportedly chained to metal rings. They are kept naked in suffocating cells for weeks at a time. They are given body cavity searches and gratuitous suppositories. They are bombarded with horrible sounds 24 hours a day – ghoulish laughter and nerve-splitting rap songs. The prisoners ram their heads into the walls, hoping for unconsciousness and death.

In the Aug. 13 New Yorker, journalist Jane Mayer reports on what is happening in the so-called “black sites” where suspected terrorists are hidden away from journalists and attorneys. For five years, the International Committee of the Red Cross was denied access. Last year, Red Cross representatives were allowed to interview 15 detainees, but what they found has not been made public. U.S. intelligence officials won’t even “acknowledge the existence of the report,” Mayer says.

Some of the detainees are dangerous and terrible human beings, no doubt about it. The government says prison secrecy is a key part of the strategy to get detainees to confess to terrorist plots. Some have confessed, and the information may have prevented additional terrorist attacks in the United States, intelligence officials say.

The CIA denies that its methods constitute unlawful torture. But Mayer’s evidence – gathered from intelligence sources, secret documents and interviews with former detainees – suggests otherwise. And some of the torture techniques may be generating false and misleading confessions.

Like many national stories, this one has an apparent link to Spokane. Spokesman-Review reporters Bill Morlin and Karen Dorn Steele discovered that Mitchell Jessen & Associates has business offices in Spokane. This psychologists group has a CIA contract and reportedly specializes in the techniques used on black-site prisoners, such as simulated drowning and sleep deprivation.

In her book “The Idea That is America: Keeping Faith with Our Values in a Dangerous World,” Anne-Marie Slaughter analyzes the consequences of compromising the values this country was founded upon. Exposure provides a corrective. Slaughter explains: “Our greatest patriots have often been those men and women who have pointed out our shortfalls and insisted on holding our government and our people to their word.”

The suspected terrorists held in prisons and black sites in Iraq, Afghanistan and other undisclosed sites are not citizens of the United States. But journalists, civil liberty attorneys, and even some members of Congress, are wondering out loud what happens when a nation founded on due process – a nation that respects the rights of even its most despicable citizens – abandons these core values elsewhere in the world.

Their voices of caution must grow louder, and some real listening finally begin.