A “Washington Post investigation”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/us-had-advance-warning-of-abuse-at-afghan-prisons-officials-say/2011/10/21/gIQA7Dg2VM_story.html?hpid=z2 released this week tells an alarming story of Department 124, an Afghan detention facility rebuilt last year with American funds. U.S. troops have transferred detainees to the facility regularly, despite repeated warnings of “systematic torture” from the International Committee of the Red Cross and, more recently, the United Nations.

The investigation revealed that CIA officials met with Department 124 leadership at least weekly. U.S. Special Operations troops brought detainees to the site. The U.N. found “compelling evidence” that detainees were tortured there — of “28 detainees interviewed”:https://www.google.com/search?q=un department 124 afghan detainees&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a first link in Google search who spent time in the facility, 26 said they had been tortured.

“We paid for Department 124; we solicited intelligence from the people running it … Really, we should have been the ones telling the U.N. and Red Cross: There was ample opportunity to figure it out, given our presence there,” “said Amy Davidson”:http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/closeread/2011/10/americans-and-torture-in-afghanistan.html, a senior editor of The New Yorker, in a blog this week.

The lines are blurry here, as questions arise of what was said by whom and when, and complicated international laws intersect and overlap. But even when U.S. officials aren’t directly torturing detainees, the funding of foreign security forces who are known to commit human rights abuse is illegal under our country’s Leahy Amendment.

And Department 124 is likely only a single case of this problem. Before U.N. and Red Cross investigations prompted changes, “a cable”:http://www.cablegatesearch.net/cable.php?id=10KABUL688 from the U.S. Embassy in Kabul released early last year by WikiLeaks admitted, “human rights organizations point to a dubious distinction — we are the only detaining nation in Afghanistan that does not have a monitoring program (of detention operations).”

As we begin to untangle ourselves from multiple Middle Eastern affairs, Americans deserve the truth about what leaders of our country have done. We need to know why we are routinely left in the dark about treatment of prisoners.

But it isn’t as easy as it sounds. How can we conduct studies, empirically measure and evaluate a practice so shrouded in secrecy? When all we have are discrete, personal accounts of torture — of officials saying “torture works” or “it definitely doesn’t” — a convoluted picture can emerge.

What we do have is Army Col. Stuart Herrington, a military intelligence specialist who assessed interrogations in Iraq. Anne Applebaum, columnist for the Washington Post, wrote, “In his experience, nine out of 10 people can be persuaded to talk with no ‘stress methods’ at all, let alone cruel and unusual ones.” Herrington said when using violence on people, “they’ll just tell you anything to get you to stop.”

We have Glenn L. Carle, a retired C.I.A. officer “who oversaw the interrogation of a high-level detainee in 2002,” “who told The New York Times”:http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/04/us/politics/04torture.html?_r=1 this year that coercive techniques “didn’t provide useful, meaningful, trustworthy information.”

We have retired Air Force Col. John Rothrock, part of a combat interrogation team in Vietnam, who, despite admitting to using psychologically invasive techniques to get a captured Vietcong guerilla who knew of plans to kill Americans in a time-sensitive situation, “conceded that”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A2302-2005Jan11.html physical torture can be utterly fruitless: “If I take a Bunsen burner to the guy’s genitals, he’s going to tell you just about anything.”Think about it — on the brink of death, at the height of emotional and physical agony — wouldn’t you say whatever your aggressor wanted you to say, regardless of whether it’s true?

These matters of “security” apparently transcend any sort of democratic input. We’re completely powerless here. Especially in these past Arab Spring months, we continue to valiantly sweep in to protect other countries’ citizens from human rights violations. But our administration is breaking international law just as egregiously — it’s just a whole lot better at hiding it.

If U.S. leaders continue to insist torture is the only effective way of keeping our country safe, I’d certainly like to see the evidence. If what we continue to do to detainees isn’t wrong, there shouldn’t be any reason huge international investigations have to occur before we know what’s going on. We can’t expect the world to stop playing dirty until we clean up our own act.

_Megan is a senior in Media._