The latest news on the torture and interrogation front is that the CIA, subject to restrictions on what it can do to prisoners on American soil, is renting a former gulag from some unnamed Eastern European country, and using it for the original purpose:

CIA interrogators in the overseas sites are permitted to use the CIA's approved "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques," some of which are prohibited by the U.N. convention and by U.S. military law. They include tactics such as "waterboarding," in which a prisoner is made to believe he or she is drowning.

Of course, the administration claims that it is dishing this treatment out only to the worst of the worst of its captives. And of course they made the same claim about the torture victims at Abu Ghraib, many of whom turned out to have picked up in street sweeps. And of course, they won't say who they're holding in the once and future present gulag, so that anyone else can assess the claims.

And of course, they got the Washington Post to withhold the sensitive detail of which Eastern European country is renting out its old gulags. So that the citizens of that country can countinue to live with the illusion that democratic governments like their own are above this sort of thing.

Meanwhile, I have to wonder how much lower these guys can sink before the kind of folks here who used to preach about the evils of communism say in public that there's some kind of a problem here. Donning a rhetorical pickaxe and miner's lamp, Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings still finds room at the bottom. But not bloody much.