THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

And even if everyone left tomorrow, the United States would have less honor than a lap dancer has clothes. It is becoming clear that our support of the corrupt Karzai regime is perfectly in line with our own moral corruption.

Across the street from U.S. military headquarters in Kabul, shrouded from view by concrete walls, the Afghan intelligence agency runs a detention facility for up to 40 terrorism suspects that is known as Department 124. So much torture took place inside, one detainee told the United Nations, that it has earned another name: “People call it Hell.”

But long before the world body publicly revealed “systematic torture” in Afghan intelligence agency detention centers, top officials from the State Department, the CIA and the U.S. military received multiple warnings about abuses at Department 124 and other Afghan facilities, according to Afghan and Western officials with knowledge of the situation.

Despite the warnings, the United States continued to transfer detainees to Afghan intelligence service custody, the officials said. Even as other countries stopped handing over detainees to problematic facilities, the U.S. government did not.

U.S. Special Operations troops delivered detainees to Department 124. CIA officials regularly visited the facility, which was rebuilt last year with American money, to interrogate high-level Taliban and al-Qaeda suspects, according to Afghan and Western officials familiar with the site. Afghan intelligence officials said Americans never participated in the torture but should have known about it.

So much easier to take them across the street than to fly them to another country.

But we never knew anything about it until it became public knowledge and then, Boy Howdy, did we ever stop it, the deliveries that is. And you have to love the White House response, delivered with that obliviousness to irony once made famous by the Soviet Union.

White House spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden said the United States has a “long-standing policy against transferring individuals to torture” and that “whenever allegations of human rights violations are raised with us, we move quickly to work with the host government to investigate and resolve them.”

A long standing policy that goes all the way back to last week, no doubt. Waiting for the squadrons of flying pigs to carpet shit the White House any minute now.