Relying on Foreign Intelligence Services

The accompanying article has a quite interesting summary of, and link to, a story about the U.S. relying on foreign intelligence services for all sorts of things, such as kidnapping people off the street, torturing them, and disposing of their bodies. That's kind of old news, though the story has the twist that President Obama's policies limiting what U.S. agencies can do "have left him with few options." Somehow, it escapes Mr. McShane that one of the President's options is to stop ordering the commission of illegal acts.

Here's a link to the original New York Times story http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/24/world/24intel.html?ref=todayspaper

On a more serious note, I don't see the problem with U.S. intelligence agencies providing other countries' police or intelligence services with information about suspected terrorists, given that we've accepted that other countries may not have judicial systems meeting our standards. The real problem is that we apparently want to contract out interrogation (torture), kidnapping, and murder, while evading responsibility for the consequences of our actions.

There is also the question of the practicality of a policy which has us turning suspected terrorists over to agencies, such as Pakistan's ISID, which may well have recruited and trained them in the first place.