After a decade of fiery public debate and bare-knuckle partisan
brawling, the United States has stumbled toward an ad hoc
bipartisan compromise over the issue of torture that rests on
two unsustainable policies: impunity at home and rendition
abroad. President Obama has closed the CIA’s “black sites,” its
secret prisons where American agents once dirtied their hands
with waterboarding and wall slamming. But via rendition — the
sending of terrorist suspects to the prisons of countries that
torture — and related policies, his administration has
outsourced human rights abuse to Afghanistan, Somalia, and
elsewhere. In this way, he has avoided the political stigma of
torture, while tacitly tolerating such abuses and harvesting
whatever intelligence can be gained from them. This “resolution”
of the torture issue may meet the needs of this country’s deeply
divided politics. It cannot, however, long satisfy an
international community determined to prosecute human rights
abuses through universal jurisdiction. It also