It seems to be a signature tactic in the Karl Rove playbook: Anytime your guys get attacked, find a way to beat your enemy over the head with the same blunt object. Cast the two sides as morally equivalent; if the results are not to your liking, rinse and repeat. Take, for instance, the debate over whether the Bush administration misled the nation into invading Iraq with trumped-up charges of biological, chemical, and nuclear arms. The administration and its clone army of pundits keep hammering their talking points: The Democrats looked at the same intelligence. They came to the same conclusion that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. How dare the Democrats play these blame games! Yes, it may be true that the Bush administration controlled the gathering of intelligence … selectively presented the juiciest morsels to Congress … pushed contrarian views into footnotes … blatantly mischaracterized the degree of dissent in the CIA and elsewhere … parroted Iraqi defectors known to be liars … but we, the poor, helpless executive branch, were just as duped as you were!

In the past several days GOP leaders have been using this tried-and-true strategy to do another sort of damage control. The Washington Post reported last week that the CIA was holding terror suspects at secret prisons in eight countries, including several Eastern European democracies, in violation of the laws of these countries and the most meager standards of international human rights. But instead of saving their fire-and-brimstone for an executive branch that had chosen to conceal this information from Congress, Republican lawmakers decided to launch a formal investigation into who had spilled the bad news to the media. The investigation will also examine the leaking of the identity of a CIA covert operative, Valerie Plame, whose husband had criticized the Bush administration; that disclosure brought about the indictment of one of Vice President Dick Cheney’s top aides last month. The implicit message of the Republican-led investigation is that the two leaks are morally equivalent: Blowing the whistle on government misdeeds is just as evil as perpetrating government misdeeds to savage your opposition.

This could not be farther from the truth. In the Plame affair, the leak was the crime. But in the case of the CIA-run prisons, the actual crime dwarfs any harm caused by the act of whistleblowing. Establishing secret prisons in a far-off country where you can torture as you see fit is morally indefensible. It pushes us into the shadows of tyrants past — the Latin American dictators who would “disappear” their enemies, holding them in extrajudicial limbo where their torture and execution could occur unseen, or the Soviet “Evil Empire” with its secret police operations, labor camps, and prisons (ironically, the CIA has reportedly used at least one Soviet-era compound in Eastern Europe for its hiding and interrogating). Whether or not the Bush administration can find a convoluted legal justification for its actions, the fact that it has chosen to outsource its dirty work to foreign lands shows nothing but moral bankruptcy: Who other than a two-bit criminal would cross the border to escape a rap? If we can’t do these things within the borders of the United States, why are we doing it in Poland, Romania, or, for that matter, Guantánamo, Cuba?

Morality aside, the secret prisons pose risks of a distinctly pragmatic nature. Nothing has been more harmful to the U.S. effort in Iraq than the revelations of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere. The scandals have strengthened extremists and radicalized moderates in Iraq and across the Arab world. So, when will the Bush administration realize that it needs to balance its short-term tactical need to acquire intelligence with its long-term strategic need to win over the moderate Muslim world? It can root out as many terrorist cells as it likes with the information it obtains from interrogations in secret locales, but if more terrorists rise up with every new allegation of Soviet-style secrecy and abuse, how is that progress in its war on terror?

The politicians who are so angry with The Washington Post should read The Gulag Archipelago and ask themselves whether they want to be following old Joseph Stalin’s lead on this one. Maybe some more ethics classes would help, too.

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen