An American gulag

The U.S. plan to lock up suspected terrorists for life in secret locations without evidence is a horrifying development.

Torturing prisoners, denying them legal safeguards and essentially refuting their existence is what rogue regimes and lawless nations do. Reading about it in China's Xinhua News Agency is especially disconcerting. The Bush administration is not only doing all this now, but making systematic plans to create an American gulag of prisons and prisoners without names and cells without numbers. From the old Soviet Union to Communist China to the banana republics of Latin America and Castro's Cuba, that's what others do.

According to reports in The Washington Post, the military and CIA have hundreds of detainees for whom they have no evidence to hold longer or who have exhausted their usefulness as intelligence sources, or never provided any information.

U.S. authorities refuse to let them go or put them in proximity to U.S. civilian or military judicial systems.

The options under study include construction of a special prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Another proposal would transfer Afghan, Saudi and Yemeni detainees from Cuba back to their home countries, where they'd reside in U.S.-built prisons.

Another option is sending detainees to U.S.-friendly third countries where they can be held indefinitely, and tortured if need be, completely out of sight and mind of U.S. laws and nosy human-rights organizations.

Detainees have been held at secret locations ranging from Afghanistan to Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean and on ships at sea.

Americans were shocked to learn of the torture and abuses at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison, and subsequent revelations of other, earlier abuses. These new proposals are another departure from the values most Americans believe symbolize their nation at home and abroad.

So what might be the next step: the holding of political prisoners whose views are considered an unspecified and unproven threat to the commonweal? Certainly, that is preposterous. Except that extreme policies predictably debase other standards.

The Post's Dana Priest reported that moving captives to friendly third countries which hold them without question was a technique used in the drug wars. Kingpins would be stashed away for later delivery to U.S. courts. Since 2001, the practice has been used to make sure detainees do not go to court or back to the streets, Priest reported.

Republicans and Democrats in Congress must challenge the administration and hold the Pentagon and CIA responsible for behavior that undermines the values and liberties they profess to protect.

These agencies do not have to operate in the public glare, but they have to be accountable to civilian law and authority. It's an abomination to take prisoners, hold them, and indefinitely deny them access to civilian and military proceedings.

That is not what America stands for, and not what it does.