Secret detentions.

Byline: The Register-Guard

Here's a sad commentary on the state of civil liberties in this country: It would have surprised, even shocked, the rest of the world if the United States had been among the nearly 60 countries that signed a treaty last Tuesday banning governments from holding people in secret detention.

The signing ceremony in Paris culminated a quarter century of efforts by families of people who vanished after being arrested or kidnapped by their governments or by people acting as agents of the state. Since 1980, there have been more than 51,000 such "disappearances" in 90 countries, and only 10,000 of those cases have been solved.

One can only marvel at the irony of Argentina, a country once plagued by disappearances that left thousands dead in the 1970s and 1980s, signing the U.N. treaty. Meanwhile, the United States, which helped draft the document, sat on the sidelines.

A State Department spokesman cryptically explained that the text "did not meet our expectations." That's Bush administration code for "gets in our way in the war on terror."

Since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the Bush administration has become a polished practitioner of secret detentions. During the invasion of Afghanistan, U.S. troops swept up hundreds of detainees, many wrongly identified as terrorism suspects, and flew them to a prison camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Since then hundreds have been held in varying states of legal limbo and subjected to harsh interrogation, some for more than half a decade. If the administration has its way, they will remain there for the duration of a war on terror that shows no signs of ending.

After 9/11, the Bush administration established a network of secret CIA prisons overseas that it now says have been emptied. But there's no guarantee they won't be filled by more terrorism suspects in the future - or that those suspects won't be whisked away without judicial review through the very sort of secret detention process that the new treaty is intended to prohibit.

Then there's the Bush administration's practice of "extraordinary rendition," in which U.S. intelligence agencies have flown detainees to countries where torture is an accepted method of interrogation.

How did the United States reach the point at which secret detentions, forbidden by the Constitution and antithetical to American values, have become a tool of U.S. foreign policy? How did we reach the point at which the United States refuses to sign a United Nations treaty that bans governments from holding people in secret detention contrary to the rule of law?

Congress and the American people must demand that the Bush administration sign the new treaty - and fully abide by its ban on the repugnant and immoral practice of secret detentions. The United States was once a symbol of all that stood against such practices. May it one day be again.