Michael Scheuer, formerly with the CIA and author of Imperial Hubris, defends the practice of "rendition" -- which is shipping terrorism suspects to countries with robust interrogation practices.

Some excerpts:

AS Congress and the news media wail about the Central Intelligence Agency's "rendition" program - its practice of turning suspected terrorists over for detainment and questioning in third countries - it is time to focus on the real issue at hand. A good starting place is Page 127 of the tablets on which are inscribed the scripture handed down by the 9/11 commission.

Here we find a description of a 1998 conversation between National Security Director Samuel Berger and his counterterrorism chief, Richard Clarke, about the capture of Abu Hajer al Iraqi, the "most important bin Laden lieutenant captured thus far." According to the report, Mr. Clarke commented to Mr. Berger "with satisfaction that August and September had brought the 'greatest number of terrorist arrests in a short period of time that we have ever arranged or facilitated.' " Part and parcel of this success, the men make clear, were the renditions of captured Qaeda terrorists.

Neither Mr. Clarke nor Mr. Berger were C.I.A. officers. They were senior White House officials who - in consultation with President Bill Clinton - set America's Al Qaeda policy from 1993 to 2001. They told the C.I.A. what to do, and decided how it should pursue, capture and detain terrorists. They knew that Abu Hajer al Iraqi was being brought to the United States for trial, and they knew - and approved - of the rendition of his compatriots to Egypt and elsewhere. Having failed to find a legal means to keep all the detainees in American custody, they preferred to let other countries do our dirty work.

Why does this matter? Because it makes clear that in dealing with detainees in 1998, and today as well, the C.I.A. is following orders from the president and his National Security Council advisers. Likewise, in 1998 and today, the agency is executing operations under those orders only after they are approved by a vast cohort of lawyers at the security council, the Justice Department and the C.I.A. itself. ...

Second, the rendition program has been a tremendous success. Dozens of senior Qaeda fighters are today behind bars, no longer able to plot or participate in attacks. Detainee operations also netted an untold number of computers and documents that increased our knowledge of Al Qaeda's makeup and plans.

Third, if mistakes were made, like the alleged cases of innocent detainees, they should be corrected, but the C.I.A. officers who followed orders should not be punished. Perfection is never attainable in the fog of war, and any errors should not distract from the overwhelming success of the program.

The story about how the rules were changed to make this practice easier was reported in the March 6 NYT ('Rule Change lets CIA freely send suspects abroad to jail ').

The NYT wrote an editorial about the practice ('Torture by proxy') on March 8. An excerpt:

American officials have offered pretzel logic to defend these practices. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has said that if the United States sends a prisoner abroad, then our nation's constitution no longer applies.

This is just the sort of thinking that led to the horrible abuses at prisons in Iraq, where the Army is now holding more Iraqi prisoners than ever: nearly 9,000. The military says it's doing a better job of screening these prisoners than in the days when a vast majority of Iraqi prisoners were, in fact, innocent of any wrongdoing. But there is still a shortage of translators to question prisoners, the jails are dangerously overcrowded, and there's never been a full and honest public accounting of the rules the American prison guards now follow.

Let's be clear about this: Any prisoner of the United States is protected by American values. That cannot be changed by sending him to another country and pretending not to notice that he's being tortured.