NO doubt the investigation into the methods of interrogation used by the CIA at detention centres housing post-9/11 terror suspects ought to have come much earlier.

But if there is any positive aspect to the sorry spectacle under way in the US, it is that the Senate — as an institution and at the level of its individual members — has demonstrated the will and capacity to call out a powerful state organisation for its misdemeanours, and correct the trajectory of the rule of law.

Compare the CIA torture findings with a parallel that has become an increasingly bigger issue in Pakistan: that of the ‘missing persons’.

As is known generally, the euphemism refers to persons who are illegally picked up — and there are strong reasons to believe that the state security agencies are responsible — and confined or interrogated without due process being followed.

It is a matter of record that over the years, many missing individuals have showed up as dumped dead bodies, often bullet-riddled and bearing marks of torture.

Also read: Commission sought to investigate ‘mysterious death’ of missing persons

The issue is linked primarily to Balochistan and the nationalist insurgency there, while there have also been reports over the years of people being picked up in KP and the tribal areas and kept in illegal detention as part of the various security operations against militancy. Worryingly, the scourge has now spread to Sindh.

Yet no amount of quizzing by a host of investigative cells, in fact by the Supreme Court itself, has solved the problem. Press reports, public outcry and heroic activism, such as the long and lonely march by Mama Qadeer Baloch, have all failed to move the state’s democratic institutions towards any sort of meaningful action.

While some people, such as most of the Adiala 11, have been recovered alive, the fate of far too many remains untraced.

Meanwhile, for good reason, suspicions remain that the agencies have not changed their ways. Pakistan might take a leaf out of the US Senate’s book.

The answer to what currently seems an intractable problem could lie in the constitution of a bipartisan parliamentary committee that works concertedly to investigate the matter and lay it bare, paving the way for taking to task individuals and institutions that are found to have exceeded the limits of their mandate.

There is no reason for parliament to not demonstrate its will and capacity in this regard, and settle once and for all the shameful matter of extra-judicial detentions and killings.

Published in Dawn, December 12th, 2014