By: William Pfaff
First published: 1 July 04, TODAY

Athens - The French Catholic novelist Georges Bernanos was in Brazil when World War II broke out. On his return to France, he was asked what change he had observed in Europe during his exile.

His reply was: "With the camps, Satan has visibly reappeared over the world."

Sixty years later, what should be said about the adoption of torture by the largest and most influential democratic state in the modern world?

What moral significance lies in the adoption by the United States of a policy of torture and the creation of secret political prisons? Torture has clearly enjoyed connivance, acquiescence, or endorsement by high officials in the government of US President George W Bush.

The matter was considered in the president's office, we are told, but Mr Bush says that he never authorised torture. It nonetheless continued to be practised.

The adoption of torture as an interrogation practice was the most significant step taken by the US following 911 - when Americans, or at least their leaders, decided that "nothing could be the same".

This proved to mean curtailed respect for domestic law and international agreements prohibiting torture; and the abandonment of the established American interpretation of the Bill of Rights in treating enemy captives.

On Monday, the US Supreme Court ruled against the Bush administration's claims of possessing "war-time" authority to ignore, suspend, or declare null or non-applicatory the Fifth and Sixth Amendments to the US Constitution.

The Fifth Amendment states: "(No person shall be) deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law." The Sixth Amendment declares that in criminal prosecutions "the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial ... and be informed of the nature and cause of the accusations; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favour; and to have the assistance of counsel for his defence".

The Court said these rules applied to American citizens being denied due process as "enemy combatants" and to persons being held at the Guantanamo Bay naval base in Cuba, controlled effectively in perpetuity by the US, where the administration contends the Bill of Rights does not apply.

The Guantanamo camp and the "holding facilities" in other foreign locations - most of them kept secret from the American press and public - have been created since 2001.

This system bears a dismaying resemblance - in its character and in its deliberate isolation of prisoners - to the Nazi and Soviet prisons and camps
of the totalitarian decades.

Hence, moral - and even theological - judgments on what the Bush team has done, become inevitable. Mr Bush has invited this by repeatedly justifying his conduct of the war on terror in religious terms, declaring the prisoners as "evil" and resisting the extension of legal and human rights protection to them.

Mr Al Gore, the defeated Democratic presidential candidate in 2000 said:"One of the clearest indications of the impending loss of intimacy with one's own soul is the failure to recognise the existence of a soul in those over whom power is exercised, especially if the helpless come to be treated as animals and degraded."

Such is the definition of torture.

The attribution of religious or theological significance to political events and
policies has been common practice in the Bush White House, under organised pressure from the evangelical Protestant right. These are beliefs which the public as a whole does not share.

However, no American government has the right to conduct national policy based on its members' private religious beliefs and theological assumptions.

A US president is elected to act according to the national interest as defined in generally acceptable secular terms.

That is why the Supreme Court rulings were so important. They were a national step back from ideologically-justified lawlessness.

(c) 2004, Tribune Media Services International.