A poor track record.

Byline: The Register-Guard

With Vice President Dick Cheney's endorsement last year of waterboarding as a "no-brainer" interrogation tool "if it would save lives," there's ample reason to worry about the fine print in the Bush administration's forthcoming guidelines on the use of "enhanced interrogative techniques."

Unfortunately, the new rules governing interrogations by the Central Intelligence Agency will be issued in a secret executive order signed by President Bush. Once again, the American people will be reassured that there's nothing to be concerned about in the new guidelines, because "we do not torture."

The president will remind the nation that it is at war with a diabolical enemy and the "enhanced" methods are needed to fight terrorism. Waterboarding, the simulated-drowning torture that was a favorite of the Khmer Rouge, apparently won't be allowed. But the order is expected to authorize the CIA to use tactics that are not permitted in the military interrogation rules specified in the recently revised Army Field Manual.

Americans have been down this road before with this president, and the sad truth is that when it comes to torture, he can't be trusted. Surrounded by "harsh interrogation" advocates such as Cheney and defended by world-class rationalizers such as Attorney General Alberto "Anything Short of Organ Failure Isn't Torture" Gonzales, Bush seems to believe that torture in the defense of liberty is no vice.

An August 2002 memo prepared by the Justice Department concluded that laws outlawing torture do not bind Bush because of his constitutional authority to conduct a military campaign. Just as the administration is putting the finishing touches on the CIA interrogation rules, the American Civil Liberties Union provided a sobering reminder of one way the president has exercised that constitutional authority.

The ACLU filed a lawsuit Wednesday that accused a Boeing Co. subsidiary of helping the CIA facilitate "the forced disappearance, torture and inhumane treatment" of three men the government suspected of terrorist involvement.

The suit alleges that Jeppesen Dataplan Inc. "has provided direct and substantial services to the United States for its so-called 'extraordinary rendition' program." Extraordinary rendition involves transferring terrorist suspects captured by the CIA to third-party countries that are known to employ torture as an interrogation technique.

Here's an example of how the ACLU says extraordinary rendition worked in the case of one of the three plaintiffs. Be warned: The torture described is gruesome.

Binyam Mohammed, a 28-year-old Ethiopian citizen and British resident, was taken into custody in Pakistan in April 2002, tortured by Pakistani agents and interrogated by U.S. and British intelligence agents about his alleged ties to al-Qaeda. He was then flown to Morocco, where he was interrogated and tortured at a series of detention facilities.

"He was routinely beaten, suffering broken bones and, on occasion, loss of consciousness due to the beatings. His clothes were cut off with a scalpel and the same scalpel was then used to make incisions on his body, including his penis. A hot stinging liquid was then poured into open wounds on his penis where he had been cut," the suit says.

Mohammed eventually was flown to Afghanistan, then to Guantanamo Bay prison, where he remains. The Bush administration has finally acknowledged the existence of the extraordinary rendition program, but it denies condoning torture.

Such denials ring so hollow that U.S. military commanders recently were forced to remind troops in Iraq not to use methods that "violate American values," a former State Department adviser labeled some U.S. interrogation techniques "immoral" and a panel of government experts issued a report criticizing the harsh interrogation practices employed since 2001 as "outmoded, amateurish and unreliable."

Playing on the public's fears of another terrorist attack in the United States, the Bush administration claims its interrogation program has obtained vital intelligence that has disrupted terrorist plans. In other words, torture works.

But intelligence experts, law enforcement officials and combat veterans sharply dispute how well torture really works. Prisoners will tell their torturers whatever they want to hear to make the pain - physical or mental - stop.

Underneath the euphemisms and legal rationalizations, torture remains a crime against humanity, a violation of the laws of war and a renunciation of everything embodied in the U.S. Constitution. It is the forfeiture of American values to the fear that the nation will lose if it refuses to respond as ruthlessly as its enemies.

But if, in succumbing to that fear, we become indistinguishable from those enemies, then there's no victory great enough to recapture what we'll have lost.